Secrecy

ISBN 10: 1551112167 / ISBN 13: 9781551112169

Published by Broadview Press

About this Item

pp. 376 2nd Edition.

Seller Inventory # 2698169869

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Secrecy
• Publisher: Broadview Press
• ISBN 10: 1551112167
• ISBN 13: 9781551112169
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Secresy was Eliza Fenwick’s only work for adults―a fact that may help to explain why this extraordinary novel has been so thoroughly overlooked. On one level this is a book that presents fascinating challenges to traditional structures of class and gender. Whereas Mr. Valmont, the villain of the piece, rejects merely the surface forms of fashionable society, the story of his niece Sibella and her friend Caroline implicitly rejects the substance as well as the trappings of a system that rested on class privilege and on female dependence. Secresy is also, though, a remarkable novel of human relationships: of sexuality (Sibella’s pregnancy is the occasion for the secrecy that gives the book its title), and of romantic love, but also the female friendship between Sibella and Caroline that is very much at the heart of the book. The relationships―and the grand themes―are expressed through an epistolary technique through which Fenwick (in the editor’s words) shows "a breadth of sympathy which can find comedic pleasure even in what is disapproved.”

About the Author

Isobel Grundy is Henry Marshall Tory Professor at the University of Alberta. She was co-editor of The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. She is author of a biography, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (1999), and is also a co-Investigator on the Orlando Project (an electronic history of women’s writing in the British Isles).