Katie Garner, Romantic
Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge. London:
Palgrave, 2017.
Reviewed by Lisa Plummer Crafton (lcrafton@westga.edu)
An unusual inscription appears in a surviving copy of
Stansby’s 1634 edition of Malory’s Le
Morte Darthur, marking the book as property of “Elizabeth Purcell of Kirton
in the year 1699 afor she was Married” (19).
The inscription is a rare record of ownership by a woman, one that marks
a material connection with Arthuriana that would become even rarer throughout
the eighteenth century and simultaneously invokes the issue of the repackaging
of Arthurian material for the “fair sex,” especially as Purcell emphasizes she
owned it “afor” her marriage. Garner’s
extensively researched and engagingly written book explores how British women
writers between 1770-1850 accessed, read, reimagined, and manipulated Arthurian
legend. Based on the fact that the
period in question saw both an antiquarian revival of British medieval romances
and an unprecedented number of women writers in print, Garner aims to study how
women writers’ responses to Arthurian legend are shaped by what she terms
“gendered patterns of access” (2). While
her focus is Romantic women writers’ appropriation of Arthurian source
materials, Garner, more broadly, reconstructs a history of reading and a study
of the traces of the search for knowledge as seen in the patterns of those
female-authored texts.
Broadly chronological, the book’s six chapters trace the
development of women’s Arthurian writing with special attention to different
genres as well as different publishing media. After an introductory first
chapter that succinctly contextualizes the argument, chapter two sets up the
context of Arthuriana in terms of gender politics and reception of romance. As an actual reader of Malory’s text,
Elizabeth Purcell inscribes a physical copy; ironically, many female “readers”
of medieval romance were not real at all, but imagined readers, the kind
Chaucer invokes in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
when he suggests that Lancelot is a
book “That women holde in ful greet reverence.”
Garner credits and builds upon Lori Newcomb’s argument that these
fictionalized female readers should be approached as ideological “scenes of
consumption” (20). Consumption, in fact, serves as a focal point for this
chapter as Garner surveys how Arthurian texts that women had access to were
both bowdlerized and reframed to underscore their moral instruction. Radagunda Roberts’ “The Female History,”
published anonymously in 1775 in The
Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, attempted to
offer a virtuous Guinevere in keeping with the magazine’s purpose, but in so
doing the queen becomes, in Garner’s words, “no more than an object passed
between two men” (29). Garner also surveys the early scholarly projects of Susannah
Dobson and Clara Reeve and the anonymous Ancient
Ballads (written by “a Lady”), especially how those ballads distanced
female readers/writers even more from actual Arthurian source texts. “Replacing”
Percy’s Reliques with these
substantially more muddled versions of Arthurian scenarios meant that female
writers like Louise Stuart Costello ended up offering somewhat “compromised”
versions of Arthurian legends, versions that dramatize “the female reader’s
compromised proximity to medieval texts” (53).
Having established this narrative of gendered patterns of
access and surveyed how female writers manipulated the resources they had,
Garner then moves to consideration of genre, the subject of the next two
chapters on Gothic and on travel narratives. The third chapter on Gothic works
particularly well to illuminate how the interest in literary fragments of Britain’s
medieval past intersected with the vogue for Gothic writing. Beginning with a brief review of how
Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
makes an important, though very limited, use of Arthurian references (the
servant Ludovico’s reading of chivalric romances allows Radcliffe to argue for
the power of the genre), Garner turns to women’s verse experiments in the Gothic
mode, evoking Robert Miles’ and Michael Gamer’s expansive definitions of Gothic
as “a discursive site crossing the genres” (74). While all five of the female
poets surveyed exemplify increasingly bold developments of Arthurian material,
Anne Bannerman and Anna Jane Vardill are particularly interesting. Scottish
poet Anne Bannerman’s 1802 Tales of
Superstition and Chivalry makes pervasive use of the female Gothic in
creating an “original and proto-feminist version of Arthur’s death” (81). Garner focuses on Bannerman’s final ballad
“The Prophecy of Merlin,” reading Arthur as more of a heroine than a
warrior/king, an interpretation that allows her to take issue with a standard
reading of the Queen of Beauty (who greets Arthur on the Yellow Isle after his
fatal wound by Modred). The Queen has been read as vampiric, but in casting
Arthur in the role of gothic heroine, Garner interprets her as a lost, absent
mother and suggests that a subversive Bannerman emphasizes “a new, benign,
maternal figure connected to [Arthur’s] eventual rebirth” (85). Vardill’s version of Coleridge’s Christabel, on the other hand, sanitizes
the fragmented, ambiguous and subversive Coleridgean text by importing Merlin
as a character who will exorcise Geraldine from the domestic order.
Another significant thread of the book’s argument concerns
the role of Arthurian texts in nationalistic discourse, and, in the fourth
chapter, Garner points out that the most sustained engagement with the
Arthurian legend was, not surprisingly, in travel narratives set in Wales. Travel
writers’ pursuit of Arthurian materials was a corollary of the many quests to
“prove” the facts of an historical Arthur. As a genre, travel writing was
flexible enough to allow for imaginative explorations of Arthuriana; just as
the travel writers were geographically crossing borders, the genre allowed easy
movement from physical description to imaginative inquiries about Welsh
history. Women writers’ manipulation of Merlin is particularly interesting.
Garner contrasts the Merlin invoked by Louisa Stuart Costello’s guidebook The Falls, Lakes, and Mountains of North
Wales (a rebellious “Briton opposed to the Saxons” and potential voice for
the working class) to Felicia Hemans’ celebration of Merlin (her “Merddin”) as
a prophetic, bardic poet.
The final two chapters move from female-authored imaginative
texts to the possibilities of and limitations to the role of female Arthurian
scholar. Garner, in chapter five, credits the work of little-known writers like
Costello in paving the way for Lady Charlotte Guest, whose pioneering
translations of the romances in The
Mabinogion signaled the arrival of female Arthurian scholarship. The
continuing unease, however, about the role of women writers (imaginative and
scholarly) led also to a more popular strain of Arthuriana suitable for
decorative annuals and gift books, and as the subject of the final chapter,
provides an apt culmination of the book’s larger consideration of gendered
practices of reading. Often mocked as lightweight—Wordsworth called them
“greedy receptacles of trash” (221)—these decorative books frequently bore
titles that, as Garner says, “suggested that the past could be preserved
through objects” (217), and, as such, are worthy of serious study. Poetic
versions of the Astolat story (also known as Scalot or, via Tennyson, the Lady
of Shalott) which appeared in the Forget
Me Not annual provide fascinating perspectives on both women’s writing and
reading. Garner argues that Costello’s “The Funeral Boat” is a “proto-feminist
version” of the tale even though the dead woman is “painted” into the landscape
at the end (223) and that Landon’s version is “appropriately sentimental”
(231), but both had significant influence on Tennyson’s poem: “In a very
straightforward sense, the origins of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ can be found in the
pages of the annuals, and the original 1832 version of [his] poem might easily
have been taken for an annual production” (247).
Engagingly written and painstakingly researched, this book
provides an insightful and multi-faceted view of Romantic women writers’
relationship with Arthurian legend. Garner’s explorations of female-authored
versions of Coleridge’s Christabel
and Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott
are, in fact, of stand-alone value regardless of the reader’s knowledge of
Arthuriana. Demonstrably proving how Romantic women writers’ encounters with
Arthurian source texts occurred in distinctly different contexts than those of
the literary men associated with what Garner labels the “hypermasculine”
medieval romance revival headed by Scott and others, the book deftly manages to
be of interest to both serious Arthurian scholars, scholars of Romantic women
writers, and theorists of reading practices and publication histories.
Lisa Plummer Crafton
University of West Georgia
