Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire.

Hammill, Faye

Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire. By P Phyllis Lassner. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2004. viii + 241 pp. $62 (pbk $24.95). ISBN 0-8135-3416-x (pbk 0-8135-3417-8).

'No place has been found for her in the postcolonial canon', says Phyllis Lassner of Rumer Godden (p. 71), a comment which might equally be applied to the six other writers considered in this important book. Colonial Strangers seeks, in the first instance, to inscribe Godden, along with Olivia Manning, Muriel Spark, Ethel Mannin, Elspeth Huxley, Phyllis Bottome, and Phyllis Shand Allfrey, into the literary history of empire. This in itself is a significant critical move, since it challenges boundaries between colonial and postcolonial, British and 'world' writing. But while Lassner's argument is founded throughout on sophisticated close reading, it moves far beyond these individual authors to confront and revise powerful critical orthodoxies.

Colonial Strangers counters the tendency of postcolonial critics 'to reduce the complex cultural and political identities and agendas of white women colonial writers to paradigms of complicity with imperial racial ideologies' (p. 8). Lassner examines her chosen writers' continual negotiations with questions of oppression, privilege, agency, hybridity, and subjectivity. The discussion is attentive to irony and multiple narrative perspectives, relating these formal features to historical context and political significance.

Still more important is Lassner's insistence that the end of empire is intimately connected with the Second World War, and that an awareness of Hitler's ideology of racial purity should be brought to bear on postcolonial readings. It is, indeed, remarkable that postcolonial critics have paid so little attention to the ways in which the war revealed 'that racism and oppression are not just the obvious and sole provenance of Nazi evil run amok; they are the hidden agenda of any imperial plot, however benign in its articulated mission' (p. 7). This point certainly did not escape the women writers considered in Colonial Strangers.

The book is organized geographically, with chapters on the literature of the Middle East, Anglo-India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Chapter 1 balances the anti-Zionist Mannin against Manning and Spark, who found legitimacy in both Jewish and Arab claims to Palestine. Lassner is particularly good on Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate, but the section on Manning, while ultimately convincing, is dense and rather hard to follow, with a high incidence of metaphors which sometimes get mixed ('in their voiceless narrative presence, silently tending a colonized garden, they represent pawns to be deployed as showpieces who demonstrate the higher morality of the British' (p. 27)).

The next two chapters read Godden and Huxley alongside screen versions of their work. Godden's Black Narcissus and The River were filmed in 1947 and 1950 respectively, while Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika was adapted for television in 1981. Lassner's illustrated analysis attends to the new possibilities and dangers inherent in the visual medium, exploring the racial and political implications of costume, make-up, dance, and especially casting. She describes an incident during the filming of The River, when several hundred university students arrived, chanting 'Foreigners out' in Hindi and Bengali, and setting fire to the set. The director, Jean Renoir, responded by discussing the film's respect for India and involving some of the students in its production. But, as Lassner argues: 'The student "invaders" resist the film's primary elegiac narrative by inserting a violently clashing postcolonial moment' (p. 130). The discussion of Allfrey and Bottome both responds and adds significantly to existing critical discourse on British writing about the Caribbean, most of which has focused on Jean Rhys. Lassner demonstrates that Allfrey's 1953 novel The Orchid House should--like Wide Sargasso Sea--be read in relation to Jane Eyre.

Colonial Strangers consistently refuses simplistic readings based on straightforward racial and cultural models. The book is an original contribution to postcolonial studies, and also draws attention to a range of fascinating but relatively neglected writers. It should lay the foundations for many future studies.

Faye Hammill

Cardiff University