Reviewed by:

• Scottish Women's Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Romance of Everyday Life by Juliet Shields
• Jack M. Downs

As Juliet Shields begins her examination of Scottish women's fiction in the long nineteenth century, the intricacy of her project emerges almost immediately. Instead of seeking out analogues with English fiction of the same period and thus "imposing implicitly Anglo-centric definitions of realism," Shields argues that it might be more productive to consider how Scottish realist fiction challenges and disrupts categories that typically organize critical evaluations of nineteenth-century British literature (10). The book begins with a consideration of Walter Scott's outsized impact on Scottish notions of history, romance, and literature. Shields then investigates the ways Scottish women wrote in response to their own unique realities, focusing her analysis on writing as a vocation, the nature and purpose of fiction, and the ethics of romanticizing the everyday and commonplace.

Much of The Romance of Everyday Life considers fiction writing as labor or a trade rather than an artistic pursuit. Shields argues that Scott provided a model for the Scottish women writers who followed because, for him, fiction writing was an occupation and a financial necessity rather than an artistic calling. Scott's financial situation necessitated his novel writing, allowing him to pay his debts and save Abbotsford, but the act of writing primarily out of financial exigency also undercut his claims to gentility. For Margaret Oliphant, Scott was a pattern for her own career in large part because he was "an author who wrote for a living and who regarded novel writing as a means to an end rather than an end in itself" (37). Shields thus identifies an artistic tension for Scott and Oliphant in which "economics and aesthetics were at odds" (38). This tension is a common thread for all the authors reviewed in The Romance of Everyday Life. Shields deftly weaves together an assessment of each author's material circumstances with critical readings of their work that produce a clear sense of how the specific cultural and historical realities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scotland shaped the fiction produced by women like Annie S. Swan, Jane and Mary Findlater, Mona Caird, Flora Annie Steel, Violet Jacob, O. Douglas, and Catherine Carswell.

Throughout The Romance of Everyday Life, the gender-focused analysis frequently and favorably echoes the work of scholars like Nancy Armstrong, Catherine Gallagher, Josephine Donovan, and Eve Tavor Bannet. Shields finds close associations between the act of writing fiction as a woman and the cultural expectations regarding domesticity, economic production, family obligations, and social and religious mores. Her analysis [End Page 145] also underscores a pervasive and particularly Scottish sense of liminality and otherness experienced by these fiction writers. All the women included in The Romance of Everyday Life demonstrate a keen awareness of what it means to be both outside and inside literary culture, traditional domestic roles, or economic production. This hybridization is most apparent in Shields's consideration of colonial adventure stories written by Violet Jacob and Flora Annie Steel. For example, she describes Jacob's novels as "explor[ing] the borderlands where metropolitan English policies and practices meet indigenous traditions" (123). This attention to otherness and liminality allows Jacob, though imperfectly, to approach the plight of colonized people with more nuance and sensitivity than contemporary male writers of imperial fiction like Rudyard Kipling or H. Rider Haggard.

The hybrid cultural and social standing of the protagonists in Jacob's and Steel's imperial romances suggests further questions about the nature and purpose of writing and reading fiction. While Shields persuasively argues that the economic impetus for writing fiction undercut the aesthetic ambitions of many of the women she examines, she delves into other reasons for writing and reading fiction in nineteenth-century Scotland. It is not uncommon to find Victorian Scottish fiction writers disparaged for seeming to ignore the social ills that accompanied the rapid industrialization of Scotland. Shields briefly counters this criticism by observing that some nineteenth-century Scottish...

审核人：

• 漫长的 19 世纪苏格兰女性写作：朱丽叶·希尔兹 (Juliet Shields ) 的日常生活浪漫史
• 杰克·唐斯

当朱丽叶·希尔兹 (Juliet Shields) 开始审视漫长的 19 世纪苏格兰女性小说时，她项目的复杂性几乎立即显现出来。希尔兹认为，与其寻找与同一时期英国小说的类比，从而“隐含地强加以盎格鲁为中心的现实主义定义”，不如考虑苏格兰现实主义小说如何挑战和破坏通常对十九世纪进行批判性评价的类别，这样可能会更有成效-世纪英国文学（10）。这本书首先考虑了沃尔特斯科特对苏格兰历史、浪漫和文学观念的巨大影响。希尔兹随后调查了苏格兰女性为回应自身独特现实而写作的方式，将她的分析重点放在写作作为一种职业、小说的性质和目的上，

大部分日常生活中的浪漫认为小说写作是一种劳动或一种贸易，而不是一种艺术追求。希尔兹认为，斯科特为后来的苏格兰女作家树立了榜样，因为对他来说，小说写作是一种职业和经济需要，而不是一种艺术使命。斯科特的经济状况使他不得不写作小说，这使他能够偿还债务并拯救阿伯茨福德，但主要出于经济紧急情况而写作的行为也削弱了他对文雅的主张。对玛格丽特·奥利芬特来说，斯科特是她自己职业生涯的榜样，这在很大程度上是因为他是“一位以写作为生的作家，他认为小说写作是达到目的的一种手段，而不是目的本身” (37)。因此，Shields 为 Scott 和 Oliphant 确定了一种艺术张力，在这种张力中，“经济学和美学是不一致的”(38)。日常生活的浪漫。希尔兹巧妙地将对每位作者的物质环境的评估与对他们作品的批判性阅读结合在一起，从而清楚地了解 19 世纪和 20 世纪初苏格兰的特定文化和历史现实如何塑造了安妮·斯旺 (Annie S. Swan) 等女性创作的小说、Jane 和 Mary Findlater、Mona Caird、Flora Annie Steel、Violet Jacob、O. Douglas 和 Catherine Carswell。

在《日常生活的罗曼史》中，以性别为中心的分析经常和赞同地呼应南希·阿姆斯特朗、凯瑟琳·加拉格尔、约瑟芬·多诺万和夏娃·塔沃尔·班内特等学者的作品。希尔兹发现，作为女性写小说的行为与对家庭生活、经济生产、家庭义务以及社会和宗教习俗的文化期望之间存在密切联系。她的分析[End Page 145]还强调了这些小说作家所经历的一种普遍的、特别是苏格兰式的阈限感和差异感。日常生活罗曼史中的所有女性表现出对文学文化、传统家庭角色或经济生产之外和内部意味着什么的敏锐意识。这种混合在希尔兹对维奥莱特·雅各布和弗洛拉·安妮·斯蒂尔所写的殖民冒险故事的思考中最为明显。例如，她将雅各布的小说描述为“探索大都市英国政策和实践与土著传统相遇的边界”（123）。这种对差异性和阈限性的关注使雅各布尽管不完美，但比拉迪亚德吉卜林或 H. 莱德哈格德等当代男性帝国小说作家更细致、更敏感地接近殖民地人民的困境。

雅各布和斯蒂尔的帝国传奇故事中主人公的混合文化和社会地位提出了关于写作和阅读小说的性质和目的的进一步问题。虽然希尔兹令人信服地论证了写小说的经济动力削弱了她所研究的许多女性的审美抱负，但她深入研究了 19 世纪苏格兰写作和阅读小说的其他原因。维多利亚时代的苏格兰小说作家因似乎忽视伴随苏格兰快速工业化而来的社会弊病而受到贬低的情况并不少见。希尔兹通过观察一些 19 世纪的苏格兰人来简要反驳这种批评……