Holly A. Laird
Women Coauthors
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. 288. $29.95

Reviewed by Jennifer Andrews

Holly Laird's Women Coauthors is a timely and provocative study of a subject that has garnered increasing attention in recent years: the female coauthor of literary texts. Professor of English and editor of the esteemed feminist journal Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Laird offers a carefully researched and thoughtful examination of literary coauthorship in English from the Victorian era to the present. The relationship of power and desire in writing, the range of coauthorship models, the concepts of originality and collaboration, and the role of the literary uncanny in understanding coauthorship act as narrative threads that weave together the individual chapters. Laird bases her argument on an eclectic yet convincing series of case studies. Her selection of coauthors ranges from famous nineteenth- and twentieth-century partnerships--such as Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas--to a selection of dual collaborations that were "considered significant in their own time," including Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (also known as E. Somerville and Martin Ross) and Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (also known as Michael Field). Laird also pays particular attention to coauthored autobiographies, and what she calls "approximate collaborations" between white female editors and black women writers or storytellers in order to examine the dilemma of appropriation. Having identified herself as a white feminist academic, the inclusion of these materials takes on a personal resonance that gives the book added depth.

Laird's study raises fundamental questions about how we as scholars read and interpret collaborative relations, how collaborators represent themselves, and how race, class, gender, and sexuality shape coauthorship, in pragmatic and theoretical ways. What is perhaps most rewarding about Laird's study is her willingness to leave the questions she raises ultimately unanswered or, at least, open to further discussion, while offering her own compelling analysis of the various partnerships. Her treatment of the Louise Erdrich/Michael Dorris collaboration is a case in point. Laird looks closely at how these authors have described their working relationship in a variety of interviews and the complexity with which one can read their self-representation in conjunction with the conclusions of several of Erdrich's novels and, finally, their only officially coauthored text, The Crown of Columbus. She gracefully sidesteps the issue of Dorris's suicide and the couple's separation, without discounting the importance of scrutinizing the power authors wield over their public construction of self. Laird further complicates this subject by pairing her examination of Erdrich and Dorris with a study of two sets of African-American women whose recent autobiographies were edited by white females (Ossie Guffy and Caryl Ledner and the Delany sisters and Amy Hill Hearth). She moves beyond the criticisms made by several scholars that the two autobiographies replicate class and race stereotypes and instead contends that, like the Erdrich/Dorris pairing, the texts become stories about collaboration and reliance on others, even as individuality and self-reliance are ostensibly being given center stage. In doing so, she presents a densely layered and compelling reading of these partnerships that brings new perspectives to the study of these individual writers, their careers, and literary studies generally.

As someone who has just completed collaborating on a book with a female colleague, an experience that has been immensely enriching to me both personally and academically, Laird's monograph is an especially enticing read. The one small disappointment is that Laird is the sole author of her text. She explains at the end of the book that the motivation for this study came from the scholarly tendency to devalue coauthored works and that she recognized her interest in collaborators' self-representation too late to include a coauthor. Nonetheless, the caliber of Laird's work speaks for itself. A highly readable and compelling book, Women Coauthors becomes its own site of collaboration. It is a book that will inspire conversation and debate among scholars for years to come.