Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works.

Marie le Jars de Gournay. Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works.

Eds. Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pbk. xxviii + 176 pp. index. bibl. $17. ISBN: 0-226-30556-2.

Dorothy Osborne. Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652-54: Observations on Love, Literature, Politics and Religion.

Ed. Kenneth Parker. The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002. xii + 348 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $84.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0382-2.

Juan Luis Vives. The Instruction of a Christen Woman.

Eds. Virgina Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Margaret Mikesell. Chicago and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. cxviii + 274 pp. index. append. illus. gloss. bibl. $39.95. ISBN: 0-252-02677-2.

Each of these new scholarly editions contributes to the growing body of published primary sources by and about European women and their status in the Renaissance. As the evidentiary base for studies in the field gains mass and breadth, the time has come to stress diversity and divergence among women writers over the formulation of more generalities about what has been called "the female voice" in early modern Europe.

Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652-54, the letters of the noblewoman Dorothy Osborne (1627-95) to her lover and eventual husband Sir William Temple (1628-99), certainly the most baroque of the three editions, for me had the most revelations. Patricia Meyer Spacks, for example, finds in the epistolary voices of Osborne's later compatriots Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Delany, and Elizabeth Carter an "ideology of self-subordination," and "denied self-esteem, and repressed sexuality" ("Female Rhetorics," in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock [1988], 181, 189). Osborne presents herself as the opposite of such women: she is explicitly self-confident, consistently assertive, never coy but always clear about her desire for William.

While Osborne has hardly been a canonical figure among early modern English women writers, she is by no means unknown. In the last hundred years nine editions of her letters have gone to press, counting Sir Edward Parry's early pioneering editions (1888, 1906, 1914), two editions pirated from Parry (one in London, the other in Toronto), G. G. Moore Smith's Clarendon Press edition (Oxford 1928), the Penguin Classics paperback produced by Kenneth Parker in 1987, and now the edition under review of Parker's work by Ashgate. Woven throughout the letters are references, always oblique (though fully fleshed out in Parker's new fifty-four-page introduction to the work and the annotations to each letter), to the precarious financial and political circumstances of two royalist families, the Osbornes and the Temples, during the English Revolution, 1640-60, and Cromwell's rule as the Lord Protector of England, 1653-58. Parker's new Ashgate volume is a revised version of the Penguin edition with vastly expanded appendices, commentary, notes, and a scholarly introduction situating the work within current feminist theories of the female writer, though he mistakenly insists that Osborne's letters were never intended for publication. Letters, as Denise Riley observes, quoting Emily Dickinson and Derrida, are always written to be seen, before and beyond the grave (The World of Selves [2000], 63-64).

A hundred years prior to Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa, Dorothy Osborne's letters to William Temple describe a situation uncannily like the one Clarissa bemoans to her friend Miss Howe. Osborne's father and brothers repeatedly try to push her into marriage with men who would offer an advantageous alliance to the family but whom Osborne herself finds repugnant. In the Osborne-Temple letters, however, there are no parental figures, and no Aunt Hervey, strong enough to override Osborne's own powerful character. Unlike Clarissa, Osborne does not sneak off with her lover. She faces her father and brother down. But was it the norm for women of her class to display so little affection--as is the case throughout her letters--for either her mother or father, whom she nursed until his death?

In an age in which noblewomen were sold off by their fathers and brothers like horses or oriental rugs, her passionate ideas about marriage are radically contrarian. In Letter 44 (144-46), a treasure trove of reflections on matrimony, Osborne proposes that couples should first live together for a trial year before deciding whether to marry. Love, the cornerstone of marriage for Osborne, depends on both passionate attachment and true friendship.

Osborne's action to settle her own marriage contract reveals a will of iron. In letter after letter, Dorothy has told William baldly that he means everything to her. But as negotiations proceed, with her father deceased and only her uncle and brother Henry to represent her, she makes it perfectly clear to William that if his father refuses to accept Henry as a party to the marriage treaty and such cash and property as she brings to the table, all marriage plans are off and that will be that. It must have been heartbreaking to Osborne that in the several months prior to the conclusion of the marriage settlement, William's father wrote not a single line of welcome to her.

Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel's new edition of Marie Jars de Gournay's (1565-1645) Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works presents the first publication in English of all the author's major works. Although Gournay was well established as a prolific author and a woman of letters in her lifetime, after 1641 her books and essays did not find a publisher until the twentieth century. Her novella La Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne appears for the first time in English translation in Hillman and Quesnel's Chicago 2002 edition, though ten editions of this bestseller came out between 1594 and 1644. The Equality of Men and Women and the Ladies' Complaint (published in French in 1910, 1978, 1993) were her first works to be translated into English (by Eva M. Sartori and Maja Bijvoet in Allegorica 9 [Winter 1987] and Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke [1989]). A complete edition of all her works is currently under way in Paris under the direction of J. C. Arnould. Only one English translation of Gournay's autobiography was ever published before Hillman and Quesnel's Apology: Elayne Dezon-Jones's "Imitation of the Life of Damoiselle de Gournay" (in Writings by Pre-Revolutionary French Women from Marie de France to Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun, eds. Anne R. Larsen and Colette H. Winn [2000]).

Each of the three major works in Hillman and Quesnel's volume demonstrates Gournay's mastery of a distinct and different genre: the novella; the autobiography; and lastly, the polemic on the nature of woman, which falls squarely within the querelle des femmes tradition. Her novella, The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne, despite its many references to Homer, the Bible, Catullus, and Virgil, clearly derives from the hugely popular translations of Second Sophistic Greek novels (such as those of the second-century C.E. authors Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius), which became available in the later sixteenth century, with their typically exotic locales, their star-crossed young lovers, shipwrecks, kidnappings, seductions, bloody murders, and suicides. Unfortunately Hillman and Quesnel have chosen to translate the 1594 edition rather than the more mature and polished 1626 version of the novel with its philosophical digressions and plot revisions (Cathleen Bauschatz, "Power Relations in Marie de Gournay," in Anne R. Larsen and Colette H, Winn, eds., Renaissance Women Writers. French Texts/American Contexts [1994], 189-208).

Gournay's querelle des femmes piece, On the Equality of Men and Women (1641), contains her most ardent argument for the rights of women. For me this is the most formulaic and least interesting of Gournay's works. Like so many of the works of the querelle, On the Equality is built around a well-worn trope from antiquity on: the catalogue of famous women (Plutarch, Valerius Maximus), extravagantly developed in Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus and subsequently revised and adapted by Filippo da Bergamo, Brantome, Pierre Le Moyne, Bartolomeo Goggio, Henricus Agrippa, Sir Thomas Elyot, among other male cataloguers; and by Christine de Pizan, Isotta Nogarola, Laura Cereta, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella, among women writers.

Gournay's autobiography--her own Socratic Apologia--the Apology for the Woman Writing (1641) is by far her most original and idiosyncratic work. The Apology is above all about money and slander--a balance sheet of her needs (a female flute player, a chemistry lab) against her thrift in the face of the profligacy of her own family members. Of her deceased parents we learn only that her father, a man of noble forbears, died without debt while her mother left the family sunk in it. Her mother gave a married sister a large dowry, while she, Marie, became a self-made woman. She took out loans to pay off her mother's debts. She taught herself Greek and Latin, and she studied classical literature and philosophy. She, whom Michel de Montaigne designated his adoptive daughter and literary heir, spent the rest of her life embellishing his fame with her writings. Calling the autobiography a "howl of protest," the editors note that the dominant strains in the Apology are self-pity, rage, and vindictiveness, though with her often venomous misandry comes genuine social criticism.

One of the most telling passages in her autobiography deals with her involvement in alchemy, a precursor of experimental chemistry that required her to boil volatile substances in glass vessels over dangerously hot fires--a habit which subjected her to ridicule (though many royal households in Europe still retained alchemists in the seventeenth century). In Gournay's case her passion for alchemy seems paradigmatic of her will to dominate and test--in her life as well as in her literary inquiries--the supposed limits of nature itself.

The coordinating editors Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, Elizabeth Hageman, and Margaret Mikesell and their associates are to be praised for the quality, precision, and thoroughness of the critical edition they have produced of the editio princeps of Richard Hyrde's English translation of Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christen Woman (1529). The volume includes a 103-page introduction on Vives's life, an appraisal of the Instruction as a sixteenth-century conduct book, a literary critique of Hyrde's translation and the work itself, a text history, and several appendices including: two lists of textual variants; a glossary of obsolete sixteenth-century words; and a second glossary explaining biblical and classical references in the work. The new edition largely retains, with very minor changes, the orthography and punctuation of the Berthelet's 1529 edition.

Vives's misogynistic treatise on women's education was certainly a "hit" in some circles, as the printing of five editions of Richard Hyrde's translation of the work in rapid succession suggests (1529a, 1529b, 1531, 1541, 1547). But we must also consider that another foreign import, Christine de Pizan's pro-woman The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes (1521, trans. Brian Anslay) was welcomed with even more interest by the literary men of the Henrician court, as Jennifer Summit has recently observed (Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 [2000], 91).

Vives, a Spanish converso Jew born in 1492 in Valencia, whose greatgrandfather was burned at the stake and his ashes thrown onto the public dump for practicing Judaism, may have been ill-equipped to grasp the mood of the English court in 1523 when he presented his Instruction of a Christen Woman to Henry VIII's consort, Catherine of Aragon, the ill-fated daughter of Queen Isabella of Spain. Having left Spain to attend university in Paris, Vives came to England, lured by the promise of a pension from the queen, arranged by Thomas More. In any case, when Henry forged an alliance with France against Spain in 1525, Catherine was exiled from the court, and Vives was divested of his lectureship at Oxford and expelled from the country.

While the many male and female readers who bought Vives's treatise in the forty-some editions printed in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish editions before 1600 might have found his chapter titles titillating ("Of the kepyng of virginite and Chastite," "Of the ordyring of the body in a virgin," "Of the lyvying alon of a virgin," "Of daunsyng," "Of lovynge," "How a mayden ought to love," "How she shulde lyve betwene her husband and herselfe privately"), the book itself must have been a disappointment to those genuinely interested in women's education. The central tenets of Vives's Instruction were the superiority of men over women and the importance of chastity as the keystone of women's training. For him, the sole purpose of women's education was to teach them abstinence from sex before marriage and chastity outside it.

DIANA ROBIN

Chicago, Illinois