AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 Rezensionen Michelle Gadpaille, “As She Should Be”: Codes of Conduct in Early Canadian Women’s Writing. (Anglistische Forschungen 393). Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Maria Löschnigg While the Canadian literary canon creates the impression that nineteenthcentury women’s writing from the area was firmly dominated by settler narratives such as Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush or her sister Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada, Michelle Gadpaille’s excellent study on Codes of Conduct in Early Canadian Women’s Writing makes one aware that the overall picture is a much more diversified one. Indeed, as she says, the “narrative of early settler life became the first (for a while, the only) women’s writing from this era to be rediscovered, excerpted and republished” (118). However, this has led to an “unfair canonization” (ibid.) which has detracted attention from a range of other remarkable genres and texts. One of the merits of Gadpaille’s book therefore lies in the unearthing of a hitherto neglected segment of Canadian literary history, and another in her systematic and illuminating exploration of the complex relationship between conduct books and early Canadian fiction by women. Gadpaille takes her title from a novel by Mary Herbert (Woman As She Should Be; or, Agnes Wiltshire, 1861) which, according to the author, “set the tone for eight decades of fiction by women in Canada” (7). Her focus on the literary production of nineteenth-century Canadian women brings to mind another seminal publication on the lives and literary output of gentlewomen in early Canada, which is surprisingly missing from the bibliography. Yet, while Marian Fowler’s The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada (1982) focuses on the gentlewoman’s survival in the Canadian wilderness, i.e. of the ‘feminine’ in a ‘masculine’ world, what Gadpaille seeks in texts by women writers, as she makes clear in her introduction, “is not national consciousness or local landscape, but an individual relation between the writer and the domestic space called home and centered on female characters, and AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 120 between the genteel narrator and her would-be-genteel reader, as conflicted as that relationship may be” (11). This approach opens up new perspectives on early Canadian writing, directing one’s attention to a sphere which was predominantly feminine and domestic and which existed alongside and outside of what was considered ‘serious’ literature. “Literary history”, as Gadpaille underlines in an explanation of the relevance of her study, “has embraced the books of practical instruction for wilderness living, but overlooked the directions for mere social survival” (8). The first chapter of “As She Should Be” deals with the conduct book, a genre which, as the author demonstrates, determined in various ways (and to various degrees) fiction written by Canadian women from the early nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century. The remarkable popularity of the conduct book in the early United States and Canada must be seen against the backdrop of the urgent need for social rules which were a fitting substitute for old (British) norms of gentility relying mainly on birth. ‘Ladyhood’ in nineteenth-century North America became increasingly determined by behaviour “and tend[ed] to situate such behaviour in a Christian context” (21), while inherited titles became increasingly irrelevant. After first providing a comparative account of conduct books in Canada and the United States, Gadpaille then sets out to analyse in detail three major Canadian and US examples respectively in order to “extract a workable pattern of conduct” (21), which forms the basic framework for her discussion of Canadian conduct fiction in chapters 3 to 6. The relationship between conduct books and fictional literature (especially the genre romance) was problematic beforehand, as Gadpaille emphasises, because of “the conduct-book’s traditional disapproval of fiction” (29). The paradoxical nature of ‘conduct fiction’ which results from this averseness is further explored in the second chapter. Here, Gadpaille discusses in detail the general opinion expressed in conduct books that reading novels was likely to have a disastrous effect on women, and especially on young girls. To deflect the impact of such verdicts, “women writers [therefore] strove to make the romantic plot [of their fictions] compatible with social and moral ideas about the education and development of young women” (38). For many nineteenth-century women writers in Canada, writing thus became a matter of balance - a skilful juggling of seemingly incompatible discourses. It is this precarious and ambivalent space which Gadpaille explores in her insightful analyses of selected stories and novels published between the 1830s and the first decade of the twentieth century. At the centre of the third chapter stands “Grace Morley: A Sketch from Life” (1839), a story by Eliza Lanesford Cushing, which constitutes, as Gadpaille convincingly argues, “the clearest example of the match between conduct rules and fictional form” (39). The two novels analysed in the fourth chapter, Rosanna Leprohon’s Antoinette de Mirecourt; or Secret Marrying, Secret Sorrowing (1864) and Mary Leslie’s The Cromaboo Mail Carrier (1878), though decades apart from “Grace Morley”, are still strongly informed by the prevailing conduct book patterns of the time - even if they differ decisively in “generic and geographical respects” (50). Surprisingly, however, this is not the case in “Alice Sydenham’s First Ball”, a story by Leprohon which appeared Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 121 fifteen years before her novel in 1849. Gadpaille’s analysis of this story in chapter 5 makes visible the subtext which lies beneath the surface of the story’s didactic discourse, showing that the author employs more advanced techniques in this earlier work than in the later novel to straddle the boundaries between conduct book and fiction. Chapter 6 deals with examples from the late 1880s to the beginning of the twentieth century. In her discussion of May Leonard’s Zöe, or Some Day (1888), Sara Jeanette Duncan’s A Daughter of Today (1894) and Amelia Fytche’s Kerchiefs to Hunt Souls (1895), Gadpaille traces shifts in the representation of rules of behaviour, and demonstrates that “the New Woman novel […] is a dead end for conduct literature” (96). The result, as she claims, was a gradual disentanglement of conduct book and fiction, which is manifested especially in her last (and chronologically latest) example, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). Through the character of Anne Shirley, Montgomery pointed to new models of behaviour for young women, portraying, as Gadpaille rightly emphasises, the first ‘real’ adolescent in Canadian literature. Inspired and methodically stringent at the same time, Gadpaille’s book is rounded off by a critical examination of the processes of canon formation in Canada, which pins down the factors responsible for the exclusion of conduct books and conduct fiction from the literary canon until the very end of the twentieth century. Cogently, the author delineates the long-standing marginality of most nineteenth-century women’s literature in Canada. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, as she points out, the factors for this neglect were, on the one hand, the general bias against ‘romance fiction’ as opposed to the more highly valued genres of drama and poetry, and on the other hand the general spirit of patriotism which characterized the early years of the Dominion. The Canada First movement, it seems, left no space for discourses which turned to the private and domestic spheres. Also, in the modernist and cosmopolitan climate of the 1920s, didacticism and romance were not valued very highly in literature. Not even in the 1960s, when Canadian Literature boomed for the first time and a re-consideration of the canon took place, did the great moment for nineteenth-century woman ‘as she should be’ come. Rather, “[t]he thematic paradigm for ‘CanLit’ became the garrison in the wilderness, with its accompanying theme of survival, and dictated for two decades what would be accepted as authentically Canadian literature” (117). It is only recently, in fact, that critics have paid more attention to Canada’s forgotten or marginalized literary genres. It is in the context of this new awareness and appreciation of literary forms which existed on the periphery of Canada’s male-dominated ‘high’ culture that Michelle Gadpaille’s monograph must be seen. Her perceptive and astute critical readings of early Canadian fiction by women against the background of the conduct-book pattern reconstruct a missing link of Canada’s literary and cultural history. There is not much one might want to criticize about this extremely well-researched book, except for a number of typographical errors, inconsistencies in the use of punctuation and one case of a footnote slipped into the main text (57). In sum, “As She Should Be”: Codes of Conduct in Early Canadian Women’s Writing provides a neglected chapter in Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 122 the history of Canadian literature which has long waited to be given the attention it deserves. The author’s lucid discussion of her material and readerfriendly style (plus useful index) will undoubtedly make the study a valuable source of information and inspiration for further research in the field. Maria Löschnigg Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Christa Jansohn, Eta Harich-Schneider: Die Sonette William Shakespeares und die Lyrik der ‘Rekusanten’. Erlebnisse und Übersetzungen einer reisenden Musikerin: 1941-1982. (Studien zur englischen Literatur 25). Berlin: L IT , 2011. Wolfgang Riehle Ihre neue wissenschaftliche Monografie widmet Christa Jansohn der international einst hoch angesehenen, heute jedoch in Vergessenheit geratenen Künstlerin, wissenschaftlichen Autorin und Übersetzerin Eta Harich-Schneider, die von 1933 (seit 1935 als Professorin) bis 1940 an der Hochschule für Musik in Berlin wirkte. Sie leitete beispielsweise Klassen für Cembalo und Kammermusik des Barock und hielt insbesondere Vorlesungen über Stilkunde, in denen es ihr um die “enge Verbindung zwischen Literatur und Musik” ging (S. 20). Durch die NS-Zeit fühlte sie sich aber auch zu politischem Widerstand gegen das Nazi-Regime herausgefordert, indem sie sich besonders für ihre jüdischen Schüler/ innen und ihre jüdische Lehrerin Wanda Landowska einsetzte. Es blieb nicht aus, dass sie als ‘judenhörig’ und ‘politisch-katholisch’ eingestuft und zur Feindin der Partei erklärt wurde. Diese Einstufung in Verbindung mit verbreitetem Neid wegen ihrer künstlerischen Erfolge veranlasste die Berliner Musikhochschule schließlich zu ihrer Kündigung. Als großer Kennerin japanischer Musik erhielt sie danach ein Angebot zu einer japanischen Konzertreise (mit eigenem Cembalo). Durch die weiteren Zeitläufte sollte sich diese Reise zu einem Japanaufenthalt bis 1949 ausdehnen, und erst nach einigen in den USA verbrachten Jahren erhielt sie eine Stelle an der Musikhochschule in Wien, die sie bis zu ihrer Pensionierung innehatte. In Wien ist sie 1986 mit 92 Jahren gestorben. Harich-Schneider war nicht nur eine mit zahlreichen Ehrungen ausgezeichnete Cembalistin, sondern auch eine vorzügliche Kennerin japanischer Musik. Ihr 1973 bei Oxford University Press erschienenes Buch A History of Japanese Music gilt noch heute als Standardwerk. Mit dieser Kompetenz hat