Watt, K.

English

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excludes other kinds o f feminist practice. However, Showalter is probably less influen-tial than Sandra M . Gilbert and Susan Gubar. To understand Gallop 's antagonism, it is necessary to recall Showalter's comment on Gallop: "Some feminist critics have taken upon themselves a revisionism which becomes a kind o f homage; they have made Lacan the ladies' man o f Diacritics ..." {Writing and Sex-ual Difference, 13-14; a note cites Gallop's "The Ladies ' M a n , " Diacritics 1976). After a lengthy contrast o f Showalter and Cheri Reg-ister, Gallop writes: "I do not wish to demon-ize Showalter for her enviable success nor do I mean to idealize Register for her marginality. Register spoke out o f turn and was dismissed; Showalter has an exquisite sense of t iming" (118). Nonetheless, her severe treatment o f Showalter is at least partially at odds with Ga l -lop's own warnings against disparaging aca-demic success, even i f it is consistent with her resistance to centralizing tendencies. Then, however, Gal lop insists that no subject is free of conflict and contradiction. She is even suspicious when others attempt to relegate Showalter to an earlier stage o f feminist crit icism: Making a Difference "would go beyond the definition o f feminist criticism as the study o f writing by women, beyond gynocritics, beyond Elaine Showalter. The latter, however, with her own excellent sense o f t iming, in 1989 edits an anthology entitled Speaking of Gender" (242). That last sentence cannot be wholly ironic, for, in its historicist self-consciousness and its attention to institutional politics, Around 1981 is nothing i f not timely. Tracy Ware Bishop's University Sister W o m a n . J .G. Sime's (with introduction by Sandra Campbell). Nepean, ON: Tecumseh Press, 1992 (1919), Pp. 293 paperback. It is a welcome sight to see J .G. Sime's Sister Woman come back into print more than sixty years after it was first published in London. Described in 1921 as a "seemingly inspired interpreter o f womanhood [who] has already made a unique place for herself among Cana-dian writers" (The [Montreal] Gazette, 23 Apr . 1921, n.p.), Georgina Sime was a vital part o f the Canadian literary scene in the first decades of the twentieth century, serving with Montreal P . E . N , for over twenty years, lecturing exten-sively throughout Ontario and Quebec, and bringing the messages o f literature to popular audiences. O f Scottish descent, Sime grew up in the fashionable London suburb o f Chiswick. (Her family consorted with the literary person-alities of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Daniel Macmil lan, Wi l l i am Morris , and " W i l -l ie" Yeats.) She lived for long stretches in Europe and in Edinburgh, and immigrated to Canada in 1907. Once in Montreal, Sime sup-ported her writing first by a day job as secre-tary in a gynecologist's office, and later by some prudent investments in the stock market. Indeed, she was so pleased with her success in this unusual territory that she compiled a treatise — not surprisingly left unpublished — entitled "Market Maxims by the Monna L i sa o f the Market-Place." "Play the market long enough, and it w i l l catch you in the end," and "the end of a market-career and the close o f a passionate love are alike in this: one never ceases being thankful to be done with both, and one is never finished longing to be in the thick of the two once more" are but two o f these collected aphorisms. A complex and elusive person and likely quite a difficult personality, Sime's politics ranged through the years — and there were many o f them, for she died in 1958 at the age of 90 — from the radical to the reactionary. In her youth, she attended some o f the Sunday afternoon meetings in Wi l l i am Morris 's Ke lm-iscott stable, which were also attended by the likes o f G . B . Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Later, she wrote for the New Statesman, composed Mistress of All Work (\9\6), a domestic mani-festo to give professional women practical solutions to the problems of juggling work in and out o f the home and, later still, in Sister Woman, she explored the lives of immigrant women in Canada during the first world war. Her highly acclaimed 1921 novel, Our Little Life, although completed when she was over 50, marks the end of this "early" period of her writing. A s the years wore on, her sight deterio-rated and she was forced to rely more heavily on editorial assistance and, eventually, on the facility with the pen o f her best friend and literary amanuensis, Frank Carr Nicholson. In a complicated collaborative arrangement that saw Sime's drafts moving from hand to hand across continent, she would send page upon page o f barely legible pencil marks on yellow paper from Montreal to Nicholson's home in England's Lake District. Here, he would patiently transcribe the bits and pieces into his own hand, edit the handwritten text, and send it to the typist who, incidentally, lived on the Isle o f Man . The typescript would be returned to Sime in Montreal to be read to her by a woman hired for this purpose or would wait at Nicholson's home for Sime's yearly visit. Fortified by Nicholson's wife's food and min-istrations, Nicholson and Sime would sit in a book-lined den overlooking Derwent Waters and read over the creations o f the previous year, pausing to alter the text as necessary. It was in these later years of virtual blindness and declining health that Sime's early political engagement seemed to all but vanish. In 1945, she wrote in one o f her almost daily letters to Nicholson: "I might here state that I am NOT a democrat. I am a hierarchist o f the First Degree. I want everyone in his place and made to stay there, myself included. Do you agree?" (Letter o f 1 A p r i l 1945). Generically unstable, Sister Woman could be described as a short story sequence (as Campbell does in her introduction to this vo l -ume) or as novel loosely tied by the framing devices o f prologue and epilogue, as both a novel about process and a novel-w-process. Twenty-eight stories are told in answer to a question posed in the prologue by an anony-mous male speaker who addresses the author with the injunction to "be articulate" (7) about what women want. A t novel's end, however, the task o f the woman writer is far from com-plete, for she confesses in the epilogue that she has "not even started yet ... I 've got reams and reams to say ... what we women want is simple — but the world isn't simple" (292). A nameless woman who "wasn't a bad g i r l " (138) is one o f the many stories gathered to stand within the frame o f the woman writer's beginning attempt at articulation: There were times in the night when she would wake up terrified. She would be there in the dark in the attic room that was reserved for the maid, and she would hud-dle herself together and lie quaking. She was terrified. What would she do! She would lie awhile and think the same things over and over again and strain her eyes into the darkness, and then she would turn so as to try to sleep again, and in turning she would feel how heavy and unwieldy she was becoming ... and she would be terrified again. (141) The housemaid's pregnancy "seemed a lot to have to pay for a minute or two o f warmth and contentment.... It seemed to her sometimes ... that she had bartered away all she had to give for just nothing at a l l " (139). Her story o f lonely fortitude is like that o f the charwoman who is s lowly losing her sight, or o f the 39-year-old sales clerk who has worked on shop floors for most o f her "long life" (151) and who scrimps and saves so that she might buy for herself the ingredients to mix a single gleaming topaz cocktail each week, a balm that allows her to rest, to forget the drudgery that is her life: No customers to worry you, ask ques-tions, be discontented, complain of you, perhaps. No shopwalker to pass you over with his eyes for something younger, more attractive, no girls to spy your grey hairs out, note your lines and wrinkles — nudge one another — pass remarks. None of that. Nothing but peace — quietness — serenity. (152) Individually, the stories are but pieces o f this fascinating palimpsestic text that gains its resonance through addition upon addition o f tales o f experience. Sister Woman is at once realist and senti-mental and politically engaged — truly an unlikely triad o f fictional possibilities — and, given Sime's virtual invisibleness to the canon o f Canadian literature, one that provokes questions about generic purity and the ascrip-tion o f value to women's writing. Aside from a few typographical inconsistencies — two lines from the bottom of a page of explanatory notes stray onto the otherwise blank page which follows, at first glance appearing to stand as an epigraph or inscription framing the tales which follow — this facsimile edition is a sound one. The introduction by Sandra Campbell provides a useful contextualization of Sime's work within its historical moment and social mil ieu, which concentrates specifi-cally on the economic and moral realities o f the early twentieth century in Canada — a time when Sime's explorations o f women's tentative independence and her articulation o f the richness and hardship o f licit and i l l ici t sexual unions was striking, particularly against the nationalist and imperialist discourses o f maternal feminism and moral purity that char-acterized this period. Sister Woman is a pro-foundly political text, for it stages a pause, a moment of speaking and listening in which the complex negotiations of women to adapt and embrace new personal, social and economic roles can be heard. K. Jane Watt Richmond, British Columbia Women's Writing in Latin America: An Anthology. Sara Castro-Klare n, Sy lv ia M o l l o y , and Beatriz Sarlo (eds.). Boulder: Westview Press, 1991, Pp. 362 hardcover. This is that rarest of volumes: one which lives up to the compliments the publisher has gath-ered to sprinkle about the bookjacket. For in-stance, Gregory Rabassa, translator o f Cortazar and Garcia-Marquez, is quoted on the jacket as saying, "This anthology w i l l give English-speaking readers a whole new trove o f top-drawer writers and their fine work." That is certainly true. More than three dozen voices o f women are represented in this volume, some of them like Gabriela Mistral , wel l known north of the Rio Grande. Other voices, some of them peasant women, are not widely known. Mary Louise Pratt o f Stanford University is quoted as saying, among other things, that this anthology is "a powerful and original con-tribution to the field o f Latin American writing in translation." So it is: powerful because of the texts selected, and original because the editors have employed a provocative method o f text selection. Moreover, in some cases, they have provided fresh or first-time transla-tions of texts. Even Nobel Prize winner Gabri-ela Mistral is looked at freshly. 

Sister Woman. J.G. Sime's (with introduction by Sandra Campbell).

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Sister Woman. J.G. Sime's (with introduction by Sandra Campbell).

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