Claire Raymond, The Posthumous Voice in Women’s Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath (Ashgate, 2006); 248 pp; ISBN-10 0-7546-5535-0 and ISBN-13 978-0-7546-5535-0

Raymond argues for a tradition of feminine self-elegy. When female writers speak in a disembodied voice from beyond death, they dramatise the position of women in patriarchy, in particular within the literary canon: passive, voiceless, even non-existent. Raymond argues that these writers use death as a rhetorical position to mourn their negation in life, to subvert female silence, and to ironise the conventions of ‘male elegy’ which tend towards closure and self-affirmation. In the Introduction, and in a general chapter on pastoral elegy, Raymond sets out her position in relation to other critics, especially feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva. There follow four chapters on Mary Shelley’s novella Matilda, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, of Christina Rossetti (as a negative example), and finally of Sylvia Plath. The conclusion asserts that in the end women use the self-elegy as a strategy to write themselves into the canon.

To scholars of the nineteenth century, the book offers intriguing readings of some of its most famous female writers, by considering their feminist use of the posthumous voice. Shelley’s novella is read in dialogue with P. B. Shelley’s play The Cenci, both of which feature a female victim of incest. Mary Shelley’s posthumous speaker impugns the abuse of paternal power, and mourns the erasure of the female in wider culture. Raymond regards Shelley’s tale as a feminist interception into ‘key topoi of Romanticism’. Raymond reads Brontë’s novel as a dialogic text, in which Catherine’s posthumous voice tries to establish itself as a counter-authority to the narration of Lockwood. Disembodied in the north wind, she attempts to overturn her outcast status by breaking into the Heights and disrupting Lockwood’s control over the text of her life. The trope of the dead child speaker in Emily Dickinson’s poems are read specifically as a dramatisation of the predicament of female voicelessness. Raymond explores Dickinson’s emphasis on namelessness as an engagement with the language of the symbolic order. Rossetti is considered briefly, but Raymond sets her apart from the tradition, using her work to clarify this tradition by contrast. Rossetti’s implicit assumption of salvation and afterlife sets her apart from self-elegy’s mourning of unredeemed self-erasure.

The strengths of the book to Victorianists are these detailed readings, and the fascinating common threads which Raymond establishes between different writers through establishing ‘feminine self-elegy’ as a strategy in feminist writing. It would be interesting both to look for further examples of this tradition, and to address whether the posthumous voice is used by any male writers, and to what effects. My caveat is to do with readability. The first chapter in particular is heavily theoretical, inaccessible for readers not schooled in feminist literary theory. The individual studies assume a fair degree of familiarity with the primary texts.

Rebecca Styler (University of Leicester)

For more details, see the Ashgate Press website