Review of: "Ana González-Rivas Fernández, El mundo clásico desde la mirada femenina: Margaret Fuller, Mary Shelley y George Eliot."
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ABSTRACT:
Book reviewed is in Spanish, review is in English. A Spanish version of the review also exists (see separate getcited entry).
Book reviewed:
Ana González-Rivas Fernández,
El mundo clásico desde la mirada femenina: Margaret Fuller, Mary Shelley y George Eliot.
Liceus (Madrid): Biblioteca de Recursos Electrónicos de Humanidades, 2008.
ISBN 978-84-9822-791-8, 167 pp.
Extract from review:
The e-book under review, by Ana González-Rivas Fernández (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) - El mundo clásico desde la mirada femenina: Margaret Fuller, Mary Shelley y George Eliot (A woman's perspective on the classical world: Margaret Fuller, Mary Shelley and George Eliot) - aims to study that classical presence in three representative works of nineteenth-century women's writing, two of them novels from England and the third an American work of non-fiction. The texts chosen are: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley; Woman in the Nineteenth Century by Margaret Fuller (1845); and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1860). The study consists of a substantial introduction outlining scope and methodology, one long chapter each on the three works analysed, general conclusions, and a full bibliography (which, imaginatively and usefully, includes a separate section listing the classical works cited in the text, in both the originals and the Spanish translations used). The works of the three authors are quoted in English, with footnoted Spanish translations; the same practice is followed for the Greek and Latin quotations.
The main purpose of the study is to show how the reception and transformation of classical motifs by women writers (who, as women, were not and could not be part of the academic system as such) led to a transmission of knowledge by alternative, non-academic routes, thus bringing about modifications in the nature of the textual canon taken as a starting-point. The author examines both the specific approaches to the classical world deployed by each of the three writers and the shared women's consciousness that ultimately unites them as pioneers of modern-day women's writing. Stress is laid on the vanguard positions and feminist orientations of all three (Mary Shelley was, after all, Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter), and also on the exceptional circumstances in terms of family and life-history which enabled each to educate herself (not forgetting the classics) and achieve a cultural level that went far beyond the normative female confines of the era. Thus, for instance, we are told how Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, "le permitía … el acceso a su biblioteca personal, donde empezó a conocer a autores como Tácito, Virgilio y Ovidio" ("allowed her … access to his private library, where she made the acquaintance of such writers as Tacitus, Virgil and Ovid" - 58-59).
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3/66
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