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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
Virginia Blain. Caroline Bowles Southey, 1786-1854: The Making of a Woman Writer. Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998. Pp. 287. $86.95.
Virginia Blain's Caroline Bowles Southey is an unusual but immensely valuable addition to the compendium of resources that seek to restore the works of lost, forgotten or neglected romantic-era women writers to us. I say unusual because the book takes a hybrid form: neither a critical edition per se nor a biographical introduction or conventional critical analysis, the book is all three at once, interspersing generous selections of Bowles's writings with Blain's informative biographical details and insightful analytical commentary. Blain organizes the materials in chronological order, with four substantive chapters that segment Caroline Bowles Southey's life as a woman writer into (1) her early life and friendship with Robert Southey, (2) her efforts to shape her career through her negotiations with Blackwood's, (3) her completion of her great verse autobiography The Birth-day, and (4) her career-stopping marriage to Southey. Each section begins with an interpretive commentary that ranges from fifteen to twenty pages, followed by excerpts from the poetry Bowles produced during those years. The book begins with a very helpful introduction that lays out authorial reputation and reception issues, and ends with three appendices (selections from Bowles's prose writings, an extract from documentary evidence of child labor in Tales of...
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