A Quarterly of Criticism and Review i^^^^^^^^fcEjfc $15

Books in Reviewits sombre social realism. The novel tells ofMyron Holder, "a mother, but not a wife,"and her persecution by the villagers ofJamestown. It seeks to expose the hypocrisyof the women who scapegoat Myron and toexpress the legitimacy of Myron's sexualtransgression. The novel is remarkable forits struggle to articulate a language offemale desire outside the boundaries ofpatriarchal tradition. Significant narrativeand stylistic parallels with NathanielHawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, ElizabethGaskell's Ruth, and Thomas Hardy's Tessestablish the international context for thisambitious social problem novel, whose nowforgotten author was once declared by theCanadian Magazine to rank amongCanada's very best writers, alongsideCharles G. D. Roberts and Gilbert Parker.Grant Allen was a Canadian by birth whospent the years of his writing career inEngland. The Woman Who Did (1895) is aliterary curiosity which generated controversyupon its publication and its belligerentlyconservative vision of social change.Herminia Barton is a beautiful, highly-educatedNew Woman who deliberately sacrificessocial respectability to protest thetyranny of marriage. She enters into a "freeunion" with her lover and raises their childalone after his death. Ostensibly concernedwith the overthrow of "the evil growth ofman's supremacy," the novel that so upsetcritics and readers is in fact a baffling mixtureof outrage at English morality andrigid prudishness about women's social andsexual destiny. For example, on the samepage that the narrator rails against "the leproustaint of that national moral blight thatcalls itself respectability," he also pronounceswith censorious smugness that thenovel's heroine "was far removed indeedfrom that blatant and decadent sect of'advanced women' who talk as thoughmotherhood were a disgrace and a burden,instead of being, as it is, the full realizationof woman's faculties." Such misogynyannouncing itself as feminism indicates thecomplex ideologies mobilized by the nineteenth-centuryWoman Question.The novel that is perhaps closest to contemporarytaste in style and subject is J. G.Sime's Our Little Life (1921). A remarkablyserious and sustained exploration of urbanpoverty, the novel presents a Dickensianportrait of life in the slums, emphasizingboth the harshness and the poignancy ofpoor peoples' lives. The novel centres onthe unlikely friendship that developsbetween the aspiring writer, Robert Fulton,and the aging seamstress, Katie McGee.Through scenes in which Robert reads sectionsof his "Canada Book"—a treatise onwhat Canada is and could be—to theuncomprehending Katie, Sime develops thecontrast between the intellectual pretensionsthat fuel Robert's disdainful withdrawalfrom the world and Katie'suneducated but passionate participation inlife. The relationship between these twodown-trodden people is handled with considerablepsychological depth and subtlety.The novel presents a grim urban vision ofCanada that is at odds with the wheat fieldsand wide open spaces most familiar in representationsfrom the period.Intervening in HistoryMichael MasonThe Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes. OxfordUP $49.50Franca lacovetta and Mariana ValverdeGender Conflicts: New Essays in Women's History.U Toronto P $4O.oo/$i6.95Reviewed by Janice FiamengoTwo studies of the nineteenth century seekto reappraise and revise conventional ideasabout the period. The Making of VictorianSexual Attitudes re-examines the assumptionthat the repressive sexual moralityassociated with Victorianism was rooted inconservative Christian theology; on the154