There are many ways of approaching Jill Ehnenn's book. The title is symptomatic of its range: “women's literary collaboration,” “queerness,” and “late-Victorian culture.” This study speaks to those topics and fields of study, but, like its predecessors in literary history doing the work of cultural studies, the book also carries out important social investigations.

To view this book as an example of turn-of-the-century British literary history tells us something quite significant about that area. It is now possible to write a monograph that turns on two formerly minor writers who have moved from margin to center. A few years ago Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) would have been among those authors whose work ought to be given more attention in a study whose topic is given justification for publication by the inclusion of more canonical, better-known contemporary writers. While Ehnenn's book provides us with useful new ways of considering Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper are taken as the standard to which to return in examining other pairs of women writers: Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and Kit Anstruther-Thompson, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (Ross), and Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell. Thus Ehnenn's study, more than a single monograph on Field, pushes their significance (indeed canonicity) further.

The justification for the book is summed up in one line: “There are few full-length studies that address the topic of women's literary collaboration at all” (6). This reality is both grounded in and challenging to the past three decades of feminist literary criticism. The statement is somewhat counterintuitive, at least until we distinguish between literal collaboration and the broader sense of community often associated with the project of historicizing women's writing. Ehnenn's work is aware of ideas of women's community yet refrains from idealizing them—even as it honors these figures from the past. The author writes: “When critics, especially feminist critics, talk about collaboration, there is a tendency to romanticize” (141). Ehnenn problematizes the place of gender and sexuality, exploring how literary partnerships “contribute to the cultural-historical development of … queer strategies and lesbian identity” (14). This book is deft literary criticism of a historical moment that has already benefited from strong feminist studies (of writers of the 1890s) and many examinations of the homosexual politics of male desire. Ehnenn's major contribution here is a new literary criticism that combines feminist and queer approaches to women writers of the fin de siècle and proceeds to queer the notion of “authorship” by a rigorous interrogation of that feminist/community ideal, collaboration. We gain insight about the process of writing and the nature of collaboration that can be taken to other historical/cultural spaces, as well as perspectives on the milieu of literary production at the turn of the century.

Another strength is the range of genres the book analyzes, which Ehnenn labels “subversive” in their results (56). The particular glimpses that Ehnenn displays are individually worthwhile for analysis. For instance, chapter 2 on ekphrastic writing concludes that the “transgressive aesthetics [of Vernon Lee and Michael Field] imagine a discourse of looking that queers the popular images and aesthetic traditions they cite. … They test the boundaries of and reveal the gaps between existing discourses on art” (96). Again, Ehnenn's study is filled with many wonderful examples of literary criticism that expand our knowledge of the authors involved. My hope for further work in this area would be a reconsideration of the scholarship on male writers of the period (particularly those associated with communities and discourses of same-sex desire) that takes into account Ehnenn's book—lesbian and feminist and queer, if not lesbian feminist in the way we might understand that category.

Still, however attractive individual (collaborative?) insights about a certain quartet (or octet?) of writers might be, Ehnenn's book draws us to the work on collaboration she seems to want to do here, whether despite or because of the particulars of the writers and period she chooses. The hard questions to evaluate come toward the end of the study. Are the female coauthors (so easy to idealize historically) “man-hating inverts,” “innocent ladies,” models of “romantic friendship,” or lesbians whose sexuality has been made invisible—the categories others have labeled them with (167)? Ehnenn admits that her own project, like her predecessors’, has aimed to right some wrong perception. For her, again despite or because of the focus on sexual politics, it is not patriarchal or heterosexist neglect but rather misinterpretations of “collaboration”: “And still, the literary critic and historian will continue to be stymied by this word collaborative in relation to the word author” (167). The “collaborative partnership (real or fantastic) and/or the jointly-authored text may also become sites that reveal displaced or repressed discord, including ruptures in convention that don’t fully recuperate images of women” (167–68). “The nineteenth-century (male) author … is the individual par excellence … a special identity that is emblematic … of what it means to occupy a dominant, easily recognized subject position. This creates a special problem for female coauthors … and for those who wish to speak about them, because we can only speak about women who wrote collaboratively using the very terms and concepts that exclude them” (168–69).

The concluding chapter nicely brings the historical concerns into the current academy (and marketplace) in glossing the dilemma of the knee-jerk “Who wrote what?” question (168). In the context of practical concerns about coauthorship, Ehnenn offers gorgeous quotations from the subjects of her study regarding the limits of such interrogation. Her own conclusions are worth application beyond this field: “Women's literary collaboration as a performative enterprise—female coauthorship as a way of being in which same-sex bodies and subjectivities are doubled, woven together—displaces laws about the properties and purposes of bodies by complicating notions of the individual author and also of the sexed and gendered individual” (172). Literary collaboration is indeed a “wide range of possible ways to engage with another writer, with the writing process, with a problem or topic, and with the idea of text” (172). As Ehnenn warns us of the perils and potentials of embarking on “collaboration,” it is hard not to think of this process and its definition in a new light for having read the book.