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My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice ed. by Annette R. Federico (review)

2022; Indiana University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.2022.a901289

1527-2052

Deanna K. Kreisel,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Reviewed by: My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice ed. by Annette R. Federico Deanna K. Kreisel (bio) My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice, edited by Annette R. Federico; pp. xiii + 316. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2020, $36.00. It took me way too long to write this review. Not the review itself, which I began one sentence ago and I can already tell I will write in an incontinent burst of energy. But the reading, the preparation for the review, took many, many moons. First, I read the introduction, twice. Then I read the entire book straight through, taking notes like a good little Victorian literature scholar. Then I set the volume aside and tried to pretend the review assignment didn’t exist. But it haunted me, this book (not to mention the assignment, whose red reminder dots kept popping up on my calendar like that thing that happens to Dorothea’s retinas in Rome). Even after I had stopped crawling into bed every night with it propped against my knees, it would awaken me at 3:00 a.m. “What am I going to do about My Victorian Novel?” my insomniac brain would whisper to me, over and over again. So much for the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. I longed to fall in love with this book at first sight. Let me hasten to say: I don’t hate this book. But I simply don’t know how I feel about this book, as a book. And because I didn’t think I could pen a full-throated panegyric, I worried about insulting the many (oh god—fifteen!) friends and colleagues whose often delightful essays are gathered here. I started to fear I would come across like Abe Weissman in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-present), trashing his old friend’s play in a review in The Village Voice in order to comment on “everything that’s wrong in the theater today” (“Everything is Bellmore,” The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, written by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino [Amazon Prime Video, 2022]). So let me hasten also to say that the individual essays in the book are all good or excellent works of literary criticism. The idea is admirable—beyond admirable. But I found myself more frustrated than I wanted to be when reading a volume of essays on novels I adore by scholars I admire, and I wasn’t sure why. At last, I had a kind of epiphany: I was approaching this book in entirely the wrong spirit. If you pride yourself on being a close reader (as do I), you should immediately notice that the volume has a subtitle: “Critical Essays in the Personal Voice.” Yet, clearly, I wanted these essays to be personal essays. I was hoping to read learned, but not necessarily scholarly, pieces characterized by “intimacy,” in which “the writer seems to be speaking directly in your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom” and “sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies” (The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, edited by Phillip Lopate [Anchor Books, 1994], xxiii). I guess I was hoping for David Sedaris with a Ph.D. nattering on about Romola (1862–3). But the subtitle does not promise me personal essays, and my petulance was entirely my own fault. Caveat lector. Unfortunately, attending to the subtitle did not immediately solve all of my problems. What is critical? What is personal? For that matter, what is an essay and what is a voice? Round and round I went in my brainpan, rethinking everything I thought I knew about the meaning of these four commonplace words. There is, in fact, a wide range of interpretations of the volume’s mandate on display here. Indeed, part of the reason that this volume doesn’t hold together for me—despite the frequent [End Page 120] excellence of its individual contributions—is the very wideness of that range. The book is framed by an erudite and informative introduction by Annette Federico, bristling with useful bibliography, and her own very personal essay that closes the volume. Federico has chosen to...