Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture

'Based on extensive archival research, Jill Ehnenn's beautifully written book meticulously traces the implications of poststructuralist theories of language, sexuality, subjectivity, ideology, and literary representation in works by several women collaborators. Ehnenn is also deeply responsive to the actualities and ethics of women collaborators' lived experience and her own acts of writing, acting, and identification. This rich merging of theory and praxis forms an important contribution to queer, authorship, feminist, and composition studies as well as literary histories of aestheticism and the New Woman.' Linda Hughes, Texas Christian University, USA The concluding chapter begins by reasserting Ehnenn's understanding of women's collaboration as a mode of articulation, a challenge to received, ideological notions, and a redefining of authorship, literature, and the sex/gender system, and ends with a call for further exploration of female collaboration, for "future study of women who lived, loved and worked together" . Women's Literary Collaboration - a significant contribution to Victorian studies, a notable effort at canon expansion, a meaningful, necessary strand of queer-feminist discourse - stands as a testament to the worth of such an endeavor. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies Overall, Ehnenns book is an entertaining, valuable and original addition to the study of late Victorian women writers. In a flourishing critical market, it finds new avenues for discussion - not dwelling primarily upon poetry or poets - and brings relatively ignored writers to the centre stage. ...[an] innovative book. It is clearly a work which will open up new avenues of thought not only with regard to the individual writers, but womens studies in general. Women: a cultural review

Jill R. Ehnenn is Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University, USA.

Contents: Coming together: an introduction; The 'art and mystery of collaboration': authorial economies, queer pleasures; Looking strategically: feminist and queer aesthetics in 'beauty and ugliness' and Sight and Song; Refusing to perform: performative silences in A Question of Memory and Alan's Wife; Collaborating with history: The Tragic Mary and The Real Charlotte; Engaging differences; Bibliography; Index.