The History of Southern Women's Literature.

Edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Pp. [xx], 689. $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-2753-1.)

With The History of Southern Women's Literature, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks seem to have created a companion volume to the anthology Southern Women's Writing (Gainesville, Fla., 1995) that they published several years ago. For this new volume of critical commentary and biography, editors Perry and Weaks have chosen neither the dry summary tone of the encyclopedia nor a straightforward narration with a single voice. Instead they present interpretative articles and biographies, totaling eighty-six in number in over six hundred pages of text, by numerous historians and literary specialists. The editors seek a new literary history that will include southern women; as Doris Betts notes in her introduction, they also wish to illustrate "the evolution of women's writing in the South" (p. 2). While the essays do not include footnotes, they generally mention the secondary accounts on which they rely.

Perry and Weaks organize the volume in four parts: the first two sections deal with the periods to 1900, while the third and fourth, which comprise almost two thirds of the pages, focus on the twentieth century. Part I, which begins with eighteenth-century works and runs through those produced during the Civil War, adopts an expansive and imaginative definition of women's writings, including not only novels and women's magazines but also captivity narratives (written by women who had lived among the Native Americans) and unpublished journals and diaries. Particularly strong are two essays by Karen Manners Smith: "The Novel" and "Southern Women Writers' Responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin." The editors also commissioned numerous biographical articles, including entries on runaway slave Harriet Jacobs, abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimke, and proslavery apologist Louisa S. McCord. However, some of their choices in this section are somewhat baffling. Apparently their eclectic definitions of authorship led them to omit discussion of the best-selling authors Mary Virginia Terhune and Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, yet they include Mary Boykin Chesnut, even though the diary that gained her acclaim was largely a postwar reworking of her wartime journal, which was not published until 1905.

Despite its focus on the relatively "New South" period of 1865-1900, Part II does not presenta unified message. The contributors are usually sympathetic to postbellum women writers while acknowledging the generally low reputation of their productions. Noteworthy in this section, however, is Kathryn McKee's piece on "Southern Women Humorists," which links them both to the nineteenth-century male southwestern humor tradition and to later female writers.

The Southern Renaissance dominates Part III, examining a host of talented women authors from Ellen Glasgow to Harper Lee. This section takes Carol S. Manning's refashioning of the Renaissance's chronology as its organizing principle by including such turn-of-the-century authors as Glasgow, whom some critics have excluded from the modernist outpouring of literature. Here the volume ranges widely, discussing Appalachian writers as well as those of the Harlem Renaissance. Perhaps because of the large number of talented writers in this lengthy period ranging from 1900 to 1960, the biographical sketches in the section focus more exclusively on novelists.

Perhaps the most disappointing section in the volume is Part IV, which features modern southern women novelists writing after 1960. Several possible reasons spring to mind. As an organizing motif, the modern South may be less coherent than the segregationist, defeated South that inspired and sometimes infuriated those who wrote during the Renaissance. Moreover, the twenty-some biographical sketches in this section add little to the more general essays. That most of the authors sketched are still active makes it far more difficult to assess their ultimate contributions to their fields. That they are living individuals may also cause their chroniclers to blunt some of the critical edge apparent in earlier parts of this volume. The biographies in this section tend to be far more congratulatory and lack the bite of those dealing with earlier writers.

In short, this is not a book that should be read straight through, nor is it merely a reference work to be brought out when facts are needed about a particular writer or genre. The essays overlap and repeat one another; but taken together, they indicate the major literary and intellectual currents involving women in the South.

JANE TURNER CENSER

George Mason University