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Reading
Coetzee’s Women

Edited by
Sue Kossew · Melinda Harvey
Reading Coetzee’s Women
 Sue Kossew • Melinda Harvey
Editors

Reading Coetzee’s
Women
Editors
Sue Kossew Melinda Harvey
Monash University Monash University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-19776-6    ISBN 978-3-030-19777-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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 Acknowledgements and Permissions

The editors are grateful to the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, and
Professor Rae Frances, for their generous financial support for the confer-
ence held in Prato, Italy, in September 2016 from which the majority of
these chapters have emerged. Grateful thanks, too, to the School of
Language, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics for internal funding for
index preparation, and Sandra Pyke for her sterling work on this. Our
gratitude to Dr Lynda Chapple and Matilda Grogan for their help in pre-
paring the chapters for publication.
For permission to quote from the J. M. Coetzee archive manuscript
materials, we are very grateful to John Coetzee and the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Sue
Kossew was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (2015–2016)
to research the J. M. Coetzee papers at the Harry Ransom Center.

v
 Contents

J. M. Coetzee and the Woman Question  1

Sue Kossew and Melinda Harvey

Part I Becoming Woman, Becoming Other  17

He and His Woman: Passing Performances and Coetzee’s

Dialogic Drag 19
Laura Wright

Molly Bloom and Elizabeth Costello: Coetzee’s Female

Characters and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination 39
Derek Attridge

‘A New Footing’: Re-reading the Barbarian Girl in Coetzee’s

Waiting for the Barbarians 55
David Attwell

vii
viii CONTENTS

Part II Aestheticising Women  69

Art and the Female in Youth: Between Joyce and Beckett 71

Paul Stewart

‘Beauty Does Not Own Itself’: Coetzee’s Feminist Critique of

Platonic and Kantian Aesthetics 87
Jana M. Giles

Part III Coetzee Reading Women 111

J. M. Coetzee and the Women of the Canon113

Gillian Dooley

Robinsonaden in the Feminine? Coetzee’s Foe and Muriel

Spark’s Robinson129
Teresa Pinto Coelho

Part IV Other Men’s Women 149

The Fixation on the Womb and the Ambiguity of the Mother

in Life & Times of Michael K151
Yoshiki Tajiri

‘God Knows Whether There Is a Dulcinea in This World or

Not’: Idealised Passion and Undecidable Desire in J. M.
Coetzee165
María J. López
 CONTENTS ix

Seeing Where Others See Nothing: Coetzee’s Magda,

Cassandra in the Karoo183
Susanna Zinato

Part V Women’s Knowledge 203

Reading Coetzee Expectantly: From Magda to Lucy205

Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn

Women’s Knowledge: Self-Knowledge and Women’s Frank

Speech in J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime221
Benjamin Kunkler

On Beyond the Representational Binary: Coetzee (and the

Women) Take Wing239
Elleke Boehmer

Index245
 Notes on Contributors

Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and

Related Literature, University of York, UK, and a fellow of the British
Academy. His books include Joyce Effects (2000), J. M. Coetzee and the
Ethics of Reading (2004), The Singularity of Literature (2004), and The
Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015). He edited The Cambridge Companion
to James Joyce (1990, 2004) and co-edited Writing South Africa:
Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970-1995 (1998), The Cambridge
History of South African Literature (2012), and Zoë Wicomb & the
Translocal (2017). His works on poetic form and the history of poetry
have been published widely.
David Attwell is Professor of English at the University of York, where he
has served as Head of the Department of English and Related Literature.
Born in South Africa, he is extraordinary professor at the University of the
Western Cape in Cape Town. Before moving to the UK he was pro-
fessor and head of the English Department at the University of the
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He co-edited and conducted the
interviews for J. M. Coetzee’s Doubling the Point Essays and Interviews
(1992). His monographs include J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the
Politics of Writing (1993), Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South
African Literary History (2005), and most recently, J.M. Coetzee and the
Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (2015). With Derek Attridge, he
co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012).
Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English, in the
English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her books include Colonial

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), the biography Nelson Mandela

(2008), Stories of Women (2005), Indian Arrivals (2015), and
Postcolonial Poetics (2018). She is the author of five novels, including
The Shouting in the Dark (2015) and Screens again the Sky (short-listed
for David Hyam Prize, 1990). Her second short-story collection To
the Volcano and Other Stories will appear in 2019, as will the Australian
edition of The Shouting in the Dark and Other Southern Writing (UWA
Press). She edited the British best-seller Robert Baden-Powell’s
Scouting for Boys (2004) and the anthology Empire Writing (1998),
and has co-edited several books, including J.M. Coetzee in Writing and
Theory (2009). She is director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing
at Wolfson College and the general editor of the Oxford Studies in
Postcolonial Literatures Series.
Teresa Pinto Coelho is full Professor and Chair at the Universidade
Nova de Lisboa, where she teaches Victorian literature, Anglo-Portuguese
imperial relations and postcolonial literature. She obtained her DPhil from
the University of Oxford in 1994 and was director of the Oxford Centre
for Portuguese Studies and supernumerary fellow of St. John’s
College from 2004 to 2007. She has published several books on his-
torical, diplomatic and cultural relations between Portugal and the
United Kingdom mainly during the late nineteenth century. Her lat-
est book, Eça de Queirós and the Victorian Press, was published by Boydell
& Brewer in 2014.
Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at
Flinders University in South Australia. Her publications included mono-
graphs, edited books, and articles on a range of writers, including V. S.
Naipaul, Iris Murdoch and Jane Austen, as well as the British maritime
explorer Matthew Flinders. Her monograph J.M. Coetzee and the Power of
Narrative was published in 2010. She was the founding general edi-
tor of the e-journal Transnational Literature and is the co-editor of
Writers in Conversation.
Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn is the Inaugural Chair of Transcultural
Anglophone Studies (TAS) at Saarland University, Germany. Focus of her
teaching and research: transcultural processes and cultural production in
the ­context of memorialization studies, museology, material culture stud-
ies, revisionist historiography, life narratives, and tourism studies. Ghosh-
Schellhorn’s main publications include Virtual Modelling in a Transcultural
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Context: Government House Calcutta as an Experiment inDigital

Humanities (forthcoming); Introducing Anglophone Transculturality:
Theories, Approaches, and Case Studies (2018); Games of Empires (co-ed.
2018); Steep Stairs to Myself: Transitionality and Autobiography (2008);
Jouer Selon les Règles du Jeu: Playing by the Rules of the Game (co-ed.
2008); Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: Anglophone India and Its
Diaspora(s) (ed. 2005); Writing Women Across Borders and Categories (ed.
2000).
Jana M. Giles is Associate Professor and Endowed Professor of English
Literature at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, United States. Her
publications have appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial
Inquiry, Conradiana, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, The Journal of
Contemporary Thought, Papers in Language and Literature, Women: A
Cultural Review, Joseph Conrad Today, and The New York Times. She is
completing a monograph on the postcolonial sublime in the twentieth-­
century novel, and currently serves as the managing editor of Conradiana.
Melinda Harvey is Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University.
She has previously published numerous essays and book reviews on J. M.
Coetzee’s writing. She works as a book critic in Australia and is a current
judge of the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Sue Kossew is Chair of Literary Studies at Monash University. Her
research focuses on J. M. Coetzee and on contemporary Australian
and South African women writers. Her books include Pen and Power:
A Post-­Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink (1996),
Critical Essays on J.M. Coetzee (ed. 1998), and Strong Opinions:
J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (co-ed. 2011).
She co-edited “Thematising Women in the Work of J.M. Coetzee”
for Australian Literary Studies 33.1 (2018), arising from the 2016
conference “Reading Coetzee’s Women” at Monash’s Prato Centre.
She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Coetzee’s
work.
Benjamin Kunkler is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne,
Australia. His doctoral research investigates how a deficit or excess of epis-
temic credibility can affect creativity in autobiographical writing. His writ-
ing has been published in Overland, Rabbit, TEXT Magazine and The
Age. He was the winner of the Affirm Press Prize for most promising
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

unpublished manuscript (2016). He teaches in the University of

Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication.
María J. López is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the
University of Córdoba. She is the author of the book Acts of Visitation:
The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee (2011). She has co-edited J.M. Coetzee and
the Non-English Literary Traditions (special issue of EJES, 20.2, 2016)
and written articles for journals such as the Journal of Southern African
Studies, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, the Journal of Literary
Studies, English in Africa and English Studies.
Paul Stewart is Professor of Literature at the University of Nicosia. He is
the author of two books on Samuel Beckett—Zone of Evaporation: Samuel
Beckett’s Disjunctions (2006) and Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s
Works (Palgrave, 2011). He has published widely on Beckett and
related authors, and is the series editor of Samuel Beckett in Company.
His article ‘Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee: Narrative Power and
the Postcolonial’ appeared in the collection Vernacular Worlds,
Cosmopolitan Imagination (2015).
Yoshiki Tajiri is Professor of English at the University of Tokyo, Japan.
He has written extensively on Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee and
twentieth-­century English literature. His essays on J. M. Coetzee have
appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature and Textual Practice and
have been reprinted in J. M. Coetzee’s the Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of
Ideas and Things (2017) and J. M. Coetzee: Fictions of the Real (2018). He
has also edited The World of J. M. Coetzee (in Japanese, 2006) and trans-
lated a selection of J. M. Coetzee’s critical essays into Japanese (2015).
Laura Wright is Professor of English at Western Carolina University,
where she specializes in postcolonial literatures and theory, ecocriticism,
and animal studies. Her monographs include Writing Out of All the
Camps: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement (2006 and 2009) and
Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial
Environment (2010). She is lead editor (with Jane Poyner and Elleke
Boehmer) of Approaches to Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and Other
Works (2014). Her most recent monograph, The Vegan Studies Project:
Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror, was published in 2015.
Her edited collection Doing Vegan Studies: Textual Animals and
Discursive Ethics is forthcoming in 2019 from the University of Nevada
Press.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Susanna Zinato is Associate Professor of English at Verona University

(Italy). Her research includes studies on rhetoric, drama and libertinism in
early-modern England (Rehearsal of the Modern. Experience and
Experiment in Restoration Drama, 2010; essays on Rochester); on the
stylistics/rhetoric of the roman fou and madness in postcolonial fiction
(The House Is Empty: Grammars of Madness in J. Frame’s Scented Gardens
for the Blind and B. Head’s A Question of Power, 1999; Ex-centric
Writing. Essays on Madness in Postcolonial Fiction, co-edited with Annalisa
Pes, 2013); on shame in postcolonial literature (Poetics and Politics of
Shame in Postcolonial Literature, co-edited with David Attwell and
Annalisa Pes, 2019); on comparative literature. She has translated and
edited Nabokov’s criticism on Russian literature for Adelphi editions.
 J. M. Coetzee and the Woman Question

Sue Kossew and Melinda Harvey

The question of Coetzee’s women is one that has been bubbling under
the surface of Coetzee criticism for some years. This volume is the first
full-length publication devoted to exploring this crucial, under-examined
and sometimes puzzling aspect of Coetzee’s literary and critical work.
Arising from a three-day conference entitled Reading Coetzee’s Women
held at Monash University’s Prato Centre in Italy in September 2016, and
attended by Coetzee himself, these essays canvass a wide range of responses
to the provocation posed by the title. A further publication, a special issue
of Australian Literary Studies called ‘Thematising Women in the Work of
J. M. Coetzee’ and published on 25 February 2018, comprises another
eight essays arising from the same conference.
In our call for papers for this event we asked delegates to consider,
amongst other things, Coetzee’s female narrators, the women writers who
have influenced him and have been compared with him, as well as the
body of feminist criticism that his work has attracted. We were more than
aware that there had been a number of individual essays and articles pub-
lished previously on Coetzee’s women characters—most often in relation
to Foe, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello—but we wished to broaden the

S. Kossew (*) • M. Harvey

Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: sue.kossew@monash.edu; melinda.harvey@monash.edu

© The Author(s) 2019 1

S. Kossew, M. Harvey (eds.), Reading Coetzee’s Women,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_1
2 S. KOSSEW AND M. HARVEY

conversation, and indeed inject some of the same interrogative spirit that
can be found in early feminist criticism of Coetzee into current scholar-
ship. For example, how to understand the prevalence of the idealisation of
women as muses and saviours in Coetzee’s novels? Paul Stewart and María
López take on this question in their contributions to this volume. Another
provocation—and one responded to ably by Gillian Dooley in this collec-
tion—is: why has his critical commentary, published in The New York
Review of Books and elsewhere, focused so rarely on women writers? It was
also on our minds that the J. M. Coetzee archive, housed in the Harry
Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and open to research-
ers since 2013, afforded contemporary commentators and critics a rich
vein of new material through which to view this topic of ‘Coetzee’s
women’, providing as it does numerous clues to Coetzee’s writerly thought
processes by means of notebooks and prolific drafts, particularly of the
earlier novels. David Attwell’s chapter in this volume continues the genetic
criticism he began in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing (2014), find-
ing in the manuscripts of Waiting for the Barbarians the deliberate inscrip-
tion of the barbarian woman as a social being, which contests the accepted
understanding of her as an oppressed, silenced, exoticised other.
By focusing on the question of Coetzee’s women, this volume links
literary studies with the fields of gender and cultural studies as well as lit-
erary history. In considering not just Coetzee’s literary women characters
but also his varied intellectual, philosophical, political, writerly and inter-
personal engagements with women and feminism, not to mention women
readers, writers and critics’ engagement with his work, this collection rep-
resents a major innovation in scholarly literary approaches to Coetzee
studies. The book is of particular relevance and urgency in the context of
the current feminist moment. Feminist approaches to the publishing
industry, for example, have noted that women writers are still under-­
represented in major literary prizes, in book reviews (as authors and as
reviewers) and in terms of their general visibility in the literary world. This
has prompted action such as the instituting of the annual VIDA Count
(since 2010) and its Australian version, the Stella Count (since 2012),
which quantitatively measure gender bias in the book pages of the U.S.,
U.K. and Australia’s major newspapers and magazines. A number of prizes
have also been established that are awarded specifically to women writers,
such as the international Women’s Prize for Fiction (since 2004) and
the Australian Stella Prize (since 2013). The preeminence that an author
like Coetzee enjoys in the literary field has a gendered context, and
 J. M. COETZEE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 3

it is a context that Coetzee himself has drawn our attention to in books

like Foe, Elizabeth Costello and Summertime. It is a context that Dooley in
our volume ponders when she reflects upon the reading lists, prescribed
and otherwise, that have constituted Coetzee’s literary education.
It is particularly relevant that many of Coetzee’s women characters are
themselves writers, and that the question of writerly authority and margin-
ality is posed by means of these characters: for example, Foe’s Susan Barton,
whose narration is overwritten by Defoe’s; and Elizabeth Costello, to
whom Coetzee returns repeatedly in his late oeuvre, who is represented as
an Australian feminist writer who rewrites Joyce’s Molly Bloom. Debates
about male authors ventriloquising female narrators are still circulating—
as can be seen in Derek Attridge and Laura Wright’s contributions to this
volume—and address larger debates about the rights and wrongs of appro-
priating the voices of ‘the other’, the lack of racial, ethnic and sexual diver-
sity in the literary world and the nature and extent of the freedoms and
empathy that fiction permits, which means that Coetzee’s persistent focus
on this ‘problem’ is of importance not only to academic literary discussion
but within a wider cultural context. Coetzee’s own ironic take on ‘the
woman question’ is textualised in the third of his ‘scenes from provincial
life’ (as he terms his fictionalised memoirs), Summertime, when ‘Coetzee’s
women’ pronounce their verdicts on him as a person, writer and a lover,
undercut by the pseudo-biographical mode of the text and the interven-
tion of the fictional ‘biographer’, Mr Vincent, who sometimes distorts
their voices: Margot, for example, notes that Mr Vincent’s ‘version doesn’t
sound like what [sic] I told you’ (Coetzee, 2009: 91). Benjamin Kunkler’s
chapter in this volume argues that ‘women’s knowledge’ in Summertime
is a crucial way of representing Coetzee’s critique of the ‘authentic’ male
autobiographical subject and a way out of the double-bind of the decep-
tion of the confessing self.
That most of the voices in Summertime are those of women (five out of
the six ‘interviews’) underlines Coetzee’s own prioritising of women char-
acters, not just in his fiction but as important influences in his life. David
Attwell, for example, emphasises the intensity of Coetzee’s relationship
with his mother, Vera in his chapter, ‘Mother’, in J. M. Coetzee and the Life
of Writing, and the ‘profound but by no means straightforward’ (166)
influence she had on his authorship. When Coetzee won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 2003 he made mention of his mother in his ban-
quet speech:
4 S. KOSSEW AND M. HARVEY

My mother would have been bursting with pride. My son the Nobel Prize
winner. And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel
Prizes if not for our mothers?
‘Mommy, Mommy, I won a prize […]
Why must our mothers be ninety-nine and long in the grave before we
can come running home with the prize that will make up for all the trouble
we have been to them? (2003b: n.p.)

The theme of mothers and mothering runs strong in this collection.

Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn revisits two of Coetzee’s women characters,
Magda and Lucy, to demonstrate their narrative agency as ‘founding
matriarchs’. Yoshiki Tajiri returns to Life & Times of Michael K through
the lens of Beckett and Otto Rank to find in its eponymous protagonist a
desire for the mother, and in particular a fixation on the protection
of the womb.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Coetzee’s women are often mothers—
thinking, writing mothers. In her 2018 book On Coetzee, the writer
Ceridwen Dovey celebrates the intelligence of Coetzee’s mothers such as
Elizabeth Curren and Elizabeth Costello: ‘The Elizabeths, in particular,
pass on to their children not just an emotional legacy but an intellectual
one, sharing with their offspring not only their bodies (wombs, breasts)
but the contents of their minds’ (2018: 9). There is a deliberate echo here
of what Mrs Curren writes in a letter to her absent daughter: that her
words ‘come from my heart, from my womb’ (Coetzee 1990 : 133).
Dovey’s book is a portrait of one such real-life mother-daughter relation-
ship—the one that exists between herself and her mother, Teresa Dovey.
The traffic between them is Coetzee’s books: they are read and discussed
in the nursery and at the kitchen table; they are a constant feature of the
household despite the family’s series of relocations from Pietermaritzburg
to Melbourne to Grahamstown to Sydney. Teresa Dovey was responsi-
ble—as her daughter is keen to underline—for the first full-length work of
criticism on Coetzee: The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories was
published in 1988. It was Teresa Dovey who articulated the idea that
‘Coetzee’s novels “did theory” on themselves’. Ceridwen Dovey is not
wrong when she says that ‘it was an epiphany of the kind that scholars live
for, an insight that—once shared—seems self-evident to everybody else
forever after because of its obvious rightness’ (54, original emphasis).
Teresa Dovey’s story as told by her daughter is a reminder to us all that
women critics were instrumental in laying the groundwork for many of the
 J. M. COETZEE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 5

faultlines in scholarship on Coetzee, and indeed for securing his literary

reputation. Sheila Roberts, Joan Gillmer, Ellen McDaniel, Helene Müller,
Debra Castillo, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Rosemary Gray, Karin van Kierop,
Hena Maes-Jelinek, Maureen Nicholson, Susan VanZanten Gallagher,
Josephine Dodd, Kelly Hewson and Paola Splendore, as well as Teresa
Dovey, all published peer-reviewed journal articles or book chapters on
Coetzee prior to the publication of Teresa Dovey’s book in 1988.
Important monographs by Susan VanZanten Gallagher (1991), Rosemary
Jolly (1996) and Sue Kossew (1996) were soon to follow. If some of these
names have dropped out of sight as far as Coetzee scholarship is con-
cerned, one might reflect for a while upon Sara Ahmed’s observations
about the politics of academic citation—about how it is ‘a rather successful
reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain
bodies’ (Ahmed, 2013), which she identifies as white and male, and has a
tendency to neglect and exclude others. One might also reflect for a while
upon the stop-start nature of many women’s careers and the impact this
has when it comes to the academic outputs and the building of networks.
Consider the fate of Teresa Dovey as her daughter Ceridwen Dovey tells it:

Holding her book in my hands sometimes saddens me. It is a material

reminder that intellectual passion ebbs and flows; that women’s careers are
always vulnerable to being truncated, subsumed by family responsibilities …
My mother gave up writing professionally on Coetzee for many reasons,
some personal, some political, from lack of conviction but also lack of con-
fidence. (2018: 63, 82)

One thinks here of what it takes Elizabeth Costello to write the novels that
make her famous: her son John remembers her secluding herself in the
morning when he was a child, leaving her two children ‘slump[ed] outside
the locked door and mak[ing] tiny whining sounds’ (2003a: 4).
It becomes apparent, by researching the archival J. M. Coetzee Papers
at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, that Coetzee’s engage-
ment with feminism dates back to the early 1970s. It is notable, for exam-
ple, in the early manuscript drafts of Dusklands—entitled Lies and dated
June 1972—that the woman’s point of view was originally included in an
exchange between Marilyn, the wife of the protagonist (named Coetzee),
and a psychologist, Miller, in their discussions of her unhappy marriage
and motherhood. Here, Marilyn talks about ‘[w]hat it means to be a
woman. Here and now. In the United States. In 1972’.1 She is described
6 S. KOSSEW AND M. HARVEY

as a kind of sex addict who is ‘dead to sensation’ and whose sexual encoun-
ters leave her feeling empty. One may assume that this is a comment on
the potentially negative effects on women of the 1970s feminist sexual
revolution that was meant to liberate them; and perhaps also to Coetzee’s
supposedly fraught relationship with his wife, Phillippa, at this time, when
they were living in the States (Kannemeyer, 2012: 162). This section, and
indeed Marilyn’s point of view, were not included in the final version of
the novel, but this early draft illustrates that, from his first novel onwards,
Coetzee was interested in representing the positionality of women charac-
ters as well as men, and also his awareness that the imposition of the
‘Father-voice’ (as he terms it in Lies) drowns out the voice of the woman.
This pattern is repeated most obviously in Foe, where Susan Barton’s
account of being a castaway is overwritten by that of Daniel Foe, the
author Defoe, so that this novel is frequently described as a feminist, post-
colonial rewriting of Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee’s echoing in both In the
Heart of the Country and, more obviously, in Foe of the canonical feminist
poem, ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (1973) by Adrienne Rich underlines his
familiarity with this body of work.2 References to Gilbert and Gubar’s
1979 feminist classic, The Madwoman in the Attic, are evident, too, in
both these novels.
Despite this evident engagement with some aspects of second-wave
feminism, Coetzee’s positionality as a ‘feminist’ has been subjected to
critical debate, most often in the context of a discussion of his women nar-
rators from his early South African texts. Benita Parry, for example,
famously accuses Coetzee of imitating women’s writing, ironically repli-
cating the male power he is critiquing: texts authored by women such as
Elizabeth Curren’s letters in Age of Iron ‘are artefacts contrived by a mas-
culine writer pursuing the possibilities of a non-phallocentric language’
(Parry, 1996: 50). Meanwhile, Josephine Dodd questions the alleged
‘newness’ of Coetzee’s contributions to South African literature on the
basis of gender; despite the ‘poststructuralist acrobatics’ (Dodd, 1998:
157), the novels remain entrenched in a patriarchal treatment of women.
She accuses him of committing ‘the very act of [the male writer’s] appro-
priation he has sought to expose’ and, on top of that, ‘vampiris[ing]’ the
writings of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich (161). Dodd’s provocative
condemnation of the textual production of woman in Coetzee’s work is
the launching pad for Paul Stewart’s consideration of Youth, which he
reads as a self-conscious negotiation of Beckett and Joyce’s understand-
ings of what it means to know and understand women.
 J. M. COETZEE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 7

Other critics, however, have seen his deployment of women narrators as

representing voices marginalised by patriarchy and a lack of authority
(even though this positionality is troubled by their white privilege) that
broadly supports a feminist perspective (Kossew, 1993; Probyn-Rapsey,
2002; Wright, 2008). Wright suggests that this perspective enables
Coetzee to ‘identify with the position of white women as complicit with,
and victimised by, patriarchal and colonial institutions’ (Wright, 2008:
13). Coetzee’s novels narrated by women are indeed complex representa-
tions of their voices, and draw attention to issues of gender, power and
authorship/authority, particularly when they are white women (often in
apartheid or post-apartheid South Africa—as are Magda, Mrs Curren,
Lucy, and Susan Barton). Lucy in Disgrace is further marginalised by her
sexuality: as a lesbian, she is outside ‘accepted’ gender boundaries and yet
is subjected to male violence that sees her as ‘fair game’ irrespective of her
sexual identity. As Canelli (2013) usefully suggests, Coetzee’s figuring of
Lucy’s refusal to report her rape can be read as her refusal to become co-­
opted into the post-apartheid national allegory whereby LGBTQI rights
are constitutionally enshrined, despite the everyday reality of violent gen-
dered encounters. Elizabeth Costello is specifically described by Coetzee
as a ‘feminist Australian writer’, whose eponymous text, Elizabeth Costello
(2003), is a collection of ‘lessons’ that Coetzee himself delivered as lec-
tures or public talks. These women narrators and characters of Coetzee’s
early and middle works tend to be intellectuals (both Mrs Curren and
Elizabeth Costello are academics), avid readers and ethically engaged.
Despite this, their voices are often drowned out by that of the male author.
Elizabeth Costello, however, appears in the novel Slow Man as fully in
control of the text and of the ‘performance’ of its male protagonist, Paul
Rayment, thereby turning the tables on the process of male authorship
and authority. In Coetzee’s later works, particularly the Jesus novels, the
women figures are more enigmatic, with Ana Magdalena, for example, the
teacher of dance in The Schooldays of Jesus, a puzzling character, more
statue than woman and seemingly hardly flesh and blood at all, despite
being violently murdered. María López addresses this topic in her chapter
in this volume.
This male rendering and articulation of a woman’s voice is a problem-
atic and significant intervention into debates about the performativity of
gendered identities. Laura Wright’s notion of ‘dialogic drag’ in her chap-
ter in this collection engages with this problem in a highly original and
thought-provoking way. As she points out, there are a number of instances
8 S. KOSSEW AND M. HARVEY

of Coetzee’s male characters ‘cross-dressing’ (the Magistrate in Waiting

for the Barbarians and Sergei Nechaev in The Master of Petersburg) and she
reads these examples alongside his representation of Elizabeth Costello, as
ways that ‘his women’ ‘refuse compliance to his interpretations and frus-
trate his all-too-conscious attempts to embody and narrate their experi-
ences’. Elizabeth Costello is a prime example in Coetzee’s writing of the
intersection of gender, literary and other historical narratives. Elizabeth
Costello is herself the author of a novel entitled The House on Eccles Street,
which is a feminist rewriting of Joyce’s Ulysses from the point of view of his
wife, Molly Bloom. Joyce’s influence on Coetzee’s writing, especially as it
pertains to the female characters and narrators in his works, is the subject
of Derek Attridge’s chapter in this volume in which he ponders the limits
and successes of the sympathetic imagination when male authors, like
Joyce and Coetzee, imagine themselves into these female characters.
Coetzee himself, in an essay on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, refers to
Charles Baudelaire’s comments on Flaubert’s representation of a woman’s
life that hint at the limits of such representation. Citing Baudelaire,
Coetzee writes,

in order to write Emma, Flaubert must have inhabited her so thoroughly

that in some sense he must have become her, become a woman; but also,
correspondingly, that in his hands Emma had become somewhat ‘bizarre
and androgynous’, a being of female form driven by an essential masculine
mode of desiring, imperious, dominating, and intent on physical satisfac-
tion. (Coetzee, 2017: 107)

Coetzee’s attunement (via Baudelaire) to the perils of this symbiotic and

yet ultimately ‘inauthentic’ relationship between male author and woman
character suggests that he himself has considered the mechanics of such
representation and that it is not something he has engaged in blindly. In
an interview with Joanna Scott, Coetzee, in response to her question of
what it meant for him to write as a woman narrator, replies with a series of
questions of his own that suggest that this is an issue he has thought about:

A complicated question. One way of responding is to ask, is one, as a writer,

at every level sexed? ls there not a level where one is, if not presexual, then
anterior to sex? First anterior to sex, then becoming sexed? At that level, or
in that transition between levels, does one actually ‘take on’ the voice of
another sex? Doesn’t one ‘become’ another sex? (Scott, 1997: 91).
 J. M. COETZEE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 9

While Wright describes this response as ‘evasive and provocative’ (100),

she also suggests that, for Coetzee, the answer to his own questions is a
‘resounding … no’ due to his awareness of respecting ‘the alterity of that
which cannot be imagined’ (100). His writerly awareness of this double-­
bind, as Paul Stewart argues in his chapter in this collection, is to be seen
in Coetzee’s representations of women in his fictionalised memoir, Youth,
which show the young writer’s self-conscious struggle to write ‘actual’
women in the light of his desire to reconcile ‘real’ women with their male-­
authored literary versions. Similarly, this text, Youth, and others such as
Foe, reveal the male writer’s desire for women to act as muses for male
writers, in the tradition of a masculinist version of modernism.
In a different angle on the notion of the muse, Chris Danta has pointed
out that several of Coetzee’s women characters, like Anna Segeyevna in
The Master of Petersburg and Anya in Diary of a Bad Year, seem to take on
the role of alleviating an older male character’s fear of dying alone ‘by
conducting him to the threshold of death, but no further’ (Danta, 2018:
13). Coetzee’s version of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, while clearly
allegorising Eurydice as Orpheus’ muse and source of inspiration, also
suggests that Orpheus’ love, despite his protestations, is not enough to
rescue Eurydice from her own solitary death. As Danta points out, in
Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee refers to the myth as ‘the story of Eurydice’
(Coetzee, 2007: 131) whereas he had previously, in notes for a 1993 semi-
nar at the University of Cape Town, described it as ‘the Orpheus story’,
revealing a change in perspective from the artist/creator to that of the
muse (Danta, 2018: 20). The writing of women who hark back to or rei-
magine classical precedents is something Susanna Zinato sees in the char-
acter of Magda from In the Heart of the Country. Magda’s madness, she
argues, is mediated and made much less straightforward by her association
with the figure of Cassandra as she emerges from Aeschylus and Euripides’
tragedies.
The prevalence of scenes of rape and the violation of bodies in Coetzee’s
texts, often with a gendered perspective, has been a specific focus of critical
attention for feminist critics. Disgrace has been particularly controversial,
not only because it narrates a rape by black men of a white woman (a clas-
sic South African racist scenario), but because it includes a narration, focal-
ised through its self-justifying male narrator, David Lurie, of a sexual act
with one of his students, Melanie, that he describes as ‘not rape, not quite
that but undesired to the core’ (Coetzee, 1999: 25) that may have racial
undertones. This seeming moral equivocation, while presented through
10 S. KOSSEW AND M. HARVEY

Lurie’s consciousness, has drawn critical responses from some feminist

critics who accuse Coetzee the author of similar ethical evasion. Similarly,
Lucy’s refusal to speak about or report her rape has been seen by some
critics as a textual act of silencing that refuses agency to the woman victim.
Boehmer, for example, points out that the textual scapegoating and silenc-
ing of Lucy reinforce a ‘continuation of [her] subjection’ (Boehmer, 2002:
350) rather than any form of redemption. Other critics (especially Graham,
2003: 440–441) raise the issue of the underplaying by some commenta-
tors of Lurie’s sexual violation of Melanie when they describe this relation-
ship as an ‘affair’ or a ‘liaison’. Graham, in addition, while drawing
attention to the text’s inclusion of Lurie’s self-aware question regarding
his ability to imagine himself as Lucy—‘does he have it in him to be the
woman?’ (Coetzee, 1999: 160)—that is, whether it is possible for a man
to understand the experience of a woman rape victim—and while acknowl-
edging that the writer, Coetzee’s, refusal to include Lucy’s (or Melanie’s)
perspective in the novel may well be an ethical decision not to inhabit the
consciousness of the ‘other’, suggests also that ultimately this textual
silencing of the voices of the women victims ‘may contribute to a wider
phenomenon of silencing’ (Graham, 2003: 444). Cooper (2005) and
Horrell (2005) explore the novel’s exploration of the symbolic aspects of
the woman’s body within the political and gendered economy of the new
South Africa, Horrell emphasising the gendered nature of guilt, as the
white woman’s body is made part of a process of reparation. Harvey
(2005) has linked Lurie’s sexual imposition on the women of the text to
the wider context of the patriarchal cultural submission of women. Jana
Giles’ chapter in this collection argues that Coetzee has been exploring the
idea that the logic of rape is at the heart of Western aesthetics—particu-
larly in regard to its ideas around female beauty—across multiple texts for
many years.
While it is clear from Coetzee’s non-fiction writings, including book
reviews and academic pieces, that his main literary forefathers (he tellingly
uses the words ‘literary paternity’ when describing his literary influences in
the piece entitled ‘Homage’) are almost exclusively male (not one woman
writer or thinker is mentioned in this essay as a ‘foremother’), there is no
doubt that he has read widely, and been influenced by, women writers and
thinkers despite what some have suggested in his ‘refusal or inability to
engage with a female literary and intellectual tradition’ (López and
Wiegandt, 2016: 119). As Gillian Dooley points out in her chapter in this
volume, the women writers with whom he engages as a critic are almost
 J. M. COETZEE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 11

always South African writers (most notably, Nadine Gordimer, Doris

Lessing, Pauline Smith, Yvonne Burgess and Olive Schreiner). The influ-
ence on Coetzee’s work of Olive Schreiner’s canonical novel, The Story of
an African Farm, and of Pauline Smith’s short stories has been traced by
critics and indeed by Coetzee himself in his chapter on the ‘Farm Novel
and Plaasroman’ in White Writing, which includes, too, a chapter on race
and racism in the novels of South African writer, Sarah Gertrude Millin,
whose emphasis on miscegenation as ‘blood, taint and degeneration’ has
found its way into the novels. While the influence of these literary women
may not have been specifically acknowledged by Coetzee, it is clear, as
López and Wiegandt suggest, that ‘a figure like Schreiner is central to
understanding novels like In the Heart of the Country or Disgrace, even if
Coetzee never presents Schreiner as a literary “mother”’ (2016: 119). In
Coetzee’s collections of essays and reviews, women writers other than
these South African authors seldom appear, apart from a rather marginal
writer, Irène Némirovsky, in Late Essays: 2006–2017. On the other hand,
Michelle Kelly points out that Coetzee’s thinking on feminist liberalism
and the law, evident in his representation of Lucy’s positionality in
Disgrace, ‘draws on feminist writers like Luce Irigaray and Carol Smart’
(Kelly, 2015: 172) and that this interest ‘is especially prominent’ in his
essay on Catharine MacKinnon, entitled ‘The Harms of Pornography’ in
his collection of essays on censorship, Giving Offense, in which he dis-
agrees with her views (Kelly, 2015: n23,175). Aarthi Vadde points out
that Elizabeth Costello may be considered ‘a descendant of [Virginia]
Woolf’ (Vadde, 2011: 238), with Woolf’s lecture from A Room of One’s
Own replaced by Costello’s ‘lessons’, both writers/lecturers ‘channeling
other women’s voices’ (Vadde, 2011: 239). There are those who suggest
that Elizabeth Costello is based on Nadine Gordimer: for example, Attwell
comments that a reference to Gordimer’s notebooks in Coetzee’s own
notes leading up to the publication of The Lives of Animals is ‘confirma-
tion that Gordimer came to mind at least some of the time when he was
creating Costello’ (Attwell, 2014: 218). Karina Szczurek goes further in
proposing ‘the striking similarities between her [Elizabeth Costello] and
the real-life South African author Nadine Gordimer’ (2009, 36). Fiona
Probyn-Rapsey suggests that Coetzee’s writing makes reference to the
‘work of diverse feminists including Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Catherine McKinnon, Virginia Woolf, and
Adrienne Rich’ (Probyn-Rapsey, 2002: 6) and proposes that his work
deploys what she calls ‘feminine metaphors’ that are ‘associated with fluid-
12 S. KOSSEW AND M. HARVEY

ity, maternity, silence, weaving and the body’ (6), noting that other critics
(in particular, Susan VanZanten Gallager and Michael du Plessis) have
linked the deployment of these tropes with Cixous’ écriture feminine.
Taking up the issue of women’s voices and language (what Virginia
Woolf called ‘a woman’s sentence’) in Coetzee’s work, Carrol Clarkson, in
a thought-provoking intervention, has proposed the term ‘womanizing’
(that is, not just Coetzee’s thematising of women but also his deployment
of women as a narrative strategy), writing that ‘Coetzee, through his
women protagonists, seems preoccupied with questions of a woman’s
place in language, and the interlocutory politics that determines sites of
narrative agency and authority’ (Clarkson, 2018: n.p.). She cites instances
where a male literary pre-text becomes ‘womanized’ in Coetzee’s narra-
tives such as his transformation of Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s Letter into
one written not by Lord Chandos but by his wife at the end of Elizabeth
Costello; and Coetzee’s short story ‘As A Woman Grows Older’ as a rewrit-
ing at least of the title of Italo Svevo’s novel, As a Man Grows Older,
among others. For Clarkson, ‘Coetzee’s women protagonists [she cites
especially Magda, Mrs Curren, Lucy and Elizabeth Costello], in different
ways, are particularly preoccupied with their places in, or relation to, lan-
guage’. She goes on to explain that, through these women, Coetzee
‘explores what it is to take up a subject position considered to be mad,
untenable, inscrutable, irrational, “difficult to take”’ (2018: n.p.). Here,
Clarkson is investigating the complex implications of the marginality not
just of woman’s socio-political positionality but her agency in language
itself and her historical exclusion not just from phallocentric language but
indeed from philosophy itself.
This latter point—that is, the particular female/feminist philosophical
position from which his women characters seem to speak—has been taken
up too by Laura Wright and Michelle Kelly. Wright has suggested that,
through the ‘persona’ of Elizabeth, particularly in the text The Lives of
Animals, Coetzee ‘performs femininity and enacts embodiment in ways
that counteract the masculinized notion of intellectual production’
(Wright, 2006: 116, emphasis added), showing how an empathetic voice
‘may always run the risk of being feminized; if … a female voice, it runs
the risk of being hystericalized as well’ (116). For Michelle Kelly, the topic
of Elizabeth Costello’s ‘feminist vegetarian’ philosophy (as Wright calls it)
‘is part of a broader critique of a philosophical rationality that privileges
soul or mind over body, exemplified formally in the “disembodied voices”
of the philosophical dialogue’ (Kelly, 2018: np). This alternative ‘female’
 J. M. COETZEE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 13

sensibility that provides a counter-balance to ‘male’ rationality is made

even starker in Coetzee’s later novels, particularly in his 2016 The Schooldays
of Jesus. Here, the mysterious, ‘unearthly’ (58) dance teacher, Ana
Magdalena, is said to be anguished about being childless—an ironic touch,
given that her counterpart, J. S. Bach’s wife, had 13 children—despite her
seeming, in the animalistic Dmitri’s words, to be ‘one of the serene angels
who live on nectar’ (57), who is, in his eyes, ‘an apparition’ (58). Dmitri’s
quasi-religious adoration of the ‘perfect’ woman—whom Simon, on the
contrary, associates with ‘a cruel persecutory chastity’ that renders her
‘bloodless, sexless, lifeless’ (78)—is, it is suggested in the text, the very
cause of his violence towards her. In a Dostoevskyan ‘interrogation of
Reason … as the basis for a good society’ (Coetzee on Dostoevsky), it is
the embodied woman who is the victim of male fantasies of female angelic
perfection. While each of these men represents and articulates either end
of a spectrum of attitudes towards women as disembodied, either as
angelic or as sexually unattainable, Ana Magdalena’s perspective is
unvoiced, hinted at only in her anguish at not being able to become a
mother. In the end, it is her lifeless desecrated corpse that ‘speaks’ in the
text and her legacy of teaching the link between body and soul through
dancing that endures both in David’s dancing of the numbers and in
Simon’s shuffling dance that nevertheless represents some kind of learn-
ing. In the dance, soul and body are one.
This volume’s focus on such questions of gender and representation in
Coetzee’s work enables new links to be made between history, philosophy
and literature (aspects of his writing that are of increasing interest to schol-
ars). This collection represents a major innovation in scholarly literary
approaches to Coetzee studies and makes important links between the
disciplines of literary and gender studies. The theme of gender and the
focus on women narrators, characters and writers provides an important
forum in which to discuss the fundamental intersections between gender,
history and culture. We have organised the chapters under five key themes:
Becoming Woman, Becoming Other; Aestheticising Women; Coetzee
Reading Women; Other Men’s Women; and Women’s Knowledge. Some
themes aim to consolidate well-established courseways in Coetzee criti-
cism; other themes aim to identify and create new tributaries. We were
especially keen to foreground the focus on ‘reading’ that was there from
the start in the conference’s title. Coetzee’s books explicitly and implicitly
negotiate other books; we read Coetzee reading in his writing. We wanted
to give discussions of Coetzee’s engagements with writers like Beckett and
14 S. KOSSEW AND M. HARVEY

Joyce a new inflection by putting women at the centre of the discussion.

There are also essays in this collection that make productive comparisons
between Coetzee’s women and women from classical literature such as
Cassandra, and other literary women such as Molly Bloom and Dulcinea.
We also wanted to put Coetzee into relation with women writers with
whom he hadn’t yet been associated. Coetzee is rarely discussed alongside
women writers; when he is, comparisons are usually made with fellow
South African writers like Nadine Gordimer and Zoë Wicomb. Teresa
Pinto Coehlo’s contribution to this volume—seeing, as it does, Coetzee
and Muriel Spark’s renditions of the Robinsonade through Portuguese his-
torical sources—demonstrates that we have barely scratched the surface
when it comes to potential comparative readings.
The collection includes essays by very well-known Coetzee scholars,
including Laura Wright, Derek Attridge, David Attwell and Elleke
Boehmer, as well as by established and emerging scholars of his work from
around the world, including the United States, England, Australia, Cyprus,
Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal and Spain, thereby providing fascinating
and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cul-
tural and scholarly perspectives. The essays range across the full breadth of
Coetzee’s texts, early and late, including his most recent novels, The
Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus. All the essays have responded
to the central question of how we read ‘Coetzee’s women’. The aim of the
collection is to provide, in one volume, a variety of perspectives on the
important topic of Coetzee’s literary women, and how one may read
them. This will, we hope, prove to be a valuable resource for scholars and
students of Coetzee’s work in particular and for those interested in the
issues of gender representation and relations in literary studies in general.

Notes
1. J. M. Coetzee Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin. Manuscripts for Dusklands, 11 June 1972.
2. See Probyn-Rapsey (2002) for a discussion of Coetzee’s use of this poem
and his engagement with difference feminism.

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Another random document with
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 ŒUFS AU PLAT.

A pewter or any other metal plate or dish which will bear the fire,
must be used for these. Just melt a slice of butter in it, then put in
some very fresh eggs broken as for poaching; strew a little pepper
and salt on the top of each, and place them over a gentle fire until
the whites are quite set, but keep them free from colour.
This is a very common mode of preparing eggs on the continent;
but there is generally a slight rawness of the surface of the yolks
which is in a measure removed by ladling the boiling butter over
them with a spoon as they are cooking, though a salamander held
above them for a minute would have a better effect. Four or five
minutes will dress them.
Obs.—We hope for an opportunity of inserting further receipts for
dishes of eggs at the end of this volume.
 MILK AND CREAM.

Without possessing a dairy, it is quite possible for families to have

always a sufficient provision of milk and cream for their consumption,
provided there be a clean cool larder or pantry where it can be kept.
It should be taken from persons who can be depended on for
supplying it pure, and if it can be obtained from a dairy near at hand
it will be an advantage, as in the summer it is less easy to preserve it
sweet when it has been conveyed from a distance. It should be
poured at once into well-scalded pans or basins kept exclusively for
it, and placed on a very clean and airy shelf, apart from all the other
contents of the larder. The fresh milk as it comes in should be set at
one end of the shelf, and that for use should be taken from the other,
so that none may become stale from being misplaced or overlooked.
The cream should be removed with a perforated skimmer (or
skimming-dish as it is called in dairy-counties) which has been
dipped into cold water to prevent the cream, when thick, from
adhering to it. Twelve hours in summer, and twenty-four in winter, will
be sufficient time for the milk to stand for “creaming,” though it may
often be kept longer with advantage. Between two and three pints of
really good milk will produce about a quarter of a pint of cream. In
frosty weather the pans for it should be warmed before it is poured
in. If boiled when first brought in, it will remain sweet much longer
than it otherwise would; but it will then be unfit to serve with tea;
though it may be heated afresh and sent to table with coffee; and
used also for puddings, and all other varieties of milk-diet.
 DEVONSHIRE, OR CLOTTED CREAM.

From the mode adopted in Devonshire, and in some other

counties, of scalding the milk in the following manner, the cream
becomes very rich and thick, and is easily converted into excellent
butter. It is strained into large shallow metal pans as soon as it is
brought into the dairy and left for twelve hours at least in summer,
and thirty-six in cold weather. It is then gently carried to a hot plate—
heated by a fire from below—and brought slowly to a quite scalding
heat but without being allowed to boil or even to simmer. When it is
ready to be removed, distinct rings appear on the surface, and small
bubbles of air. It must then be carried carefully back to the dairy, and
may be skimmed in twelve hours afterwards. The cream should be
well drained from the milk—which will be very poor—as this is done.
It may then be converted into excellent butter, merely by beating it
with the hand in a shallow wooden tub, which is, we are informed,
the usual manner of making it in small Devonshire dairies.
 DU LAIT A MADAME.

Boil a quart of new milk, and let it cool sufficiently to allow the
cream to be taken off; then rinse an earthen jar well in every part
with buttermilk, and while the boiled milk is still rather warm, pour it
in and add the cream gently on the top. Let it remain twenty-four
hours, turn it into a deep dish, mix it with pounded sugar, and it will
be ready to serve. This preparation is much eaten abroad during the
summer, and is considered very wholesome. The milk, by the
foregoing process, becomes a very soft curd, slightly, but not at all
unpleasantly, acid in flavour. A cover, or thick folded cloth, should be
placed on the jar after the milk is poured in, and it should be kept in a
moderately warm place. In very sultry weather less time may be
allowed for the milk to stand.
Obs.—We give this and the following receipt from an unpublished
work which we have in progress, being always desirous to make
such information as we possess generally useful as far as we can.
 CURDS AND WHEY.

Rennet is generally prepared for dairy-use by butchers, and kept

in farmhouses hung in the chimney corners, where it will remain
good a long time. It is the inner stomach of the calf, from which the
curd is removed, and which is salted and stretched out to dry on
splinters of wood, or strong wooden skewers. It should be preserved
from dust and smoke (by a paper-bag or other means), and portions
of it cut off as wanted. Soak a small bit in half a teacupful of warm
water, and let it remain in it for an hour or two; then pour into a quart
of warm new milk a dessertspoonful of the rennet-liquor, and keep it
in a warm place until the whey appears separated from the curd, and
looks clear. The smaller the proportion of rennet used, the more soft
and delicate will be the curd. We write these directions from
recollection, having often had the dish thus prepared, but having no
memorandum at this moment of the precise proportions used. Less
than an inch square of the rennet would be sufficient, we think, for a
gallon of milk, if some hours were allowed for it to turn. When rennet-
whey, which is a most valuable beverage in many cases of illness, is
required for an invalid to drink, a bit of the rennet, after being quickly
and slightly rinsed, may be stirred at once into the warm milk, as the
curd becoming hard is then of no consequence. It must be kept
warm until the whey appears and is clear. It may then be strained,
and given to the patient to drink, or allowed to become cold before it
is taken. In feverish complaints it has often the most benign effect.
Devonshire junket is merely a dish or bowl of sweetened curds
and whey, covered with the thick cream of scalded milk, for which
see page 451.
 CHAPTER XXIII.

Sweet Dishes, or Entremets.

Jelly of two colours, with macedoire of fruit.

 TO PREPARE CALF’S FEET STOCK.

The feet are usually sent in from

the butcher’s ready to be
dressed, but as they are sold at
a very much cheaper rate when
the hair has not been cleared
from them, and as they may
then be depended on for
supplying the utmost amount of
nutriment which they contain, it
is often desirable to have them
White and Rose-coloured Jelly.
altogether prepared by the cook.
In former editions of this work
we directed that they should be “dipped into cold water, and
sprinkled with resin in fine powder; then covered with boiling water
and left for a minute or two untouched before they were scraped;”
and this method we had followed with entire success for a long time,
but we afterwards discovered that the resin was not necessary, and
that the feet could be quite as well prepared by mere scalding, or
being laid into water at the point of boiling, and kept in it for a few
minutes by the side of the fire. The hair, as we have already stated in
the first pages of Chapter IX. (Veal), must be very closely scraped
from them with a blunt-edged knife; and the hoofs must be removed
by being struck sharply down against the edge of a strong table or
sink, the leg-bone being held tightly in the hand. The feet must be
afterwards washed delicately clean before they are further used.
When this has been done, divide them at the joint, split the claws,
and take away the fat that is between them. Should the feet be large,
put a gallon of cold water to the four, but from a pint to a quart less if
they be of moderate size or small. Boil them gently down until the
flesh has parted entirely from the bones, and the liquor is reduced
nearly or quite half; strain, and let it stand until cold; remove every
particle of fat from the top before it is used, and be careful not to take
the sediment.
Calf’s feet (large), 4; water, 1 gallon: 6 to 7 hours.
 TO CLARIFY CALF’S FEET STOCK.

Break up a quart of the stock, put it into a clean stewpan with the
whites of five large or of six small eggs, two ounces of sugar, and the
strained juice of a small lemon; place it over a gentle fire, and do not
stir it after the scum begins to form; when it has boiled five or six
minutes, if the liquid part be clear, turn it into a jelly-bag, and pass it
through a second time should it not be perfectly transparent the first.
To consumptive patients, and others requiring restoratives, but
forbidden to take stimulants, the jelly thus prepared is often very
acceptable, and may be taken with impunity, when it would be highly
injurious made with wine. More white of egg is required to clarify it
than when sugar and acid are used in larger quantities, as both of
these assist the process. For blanc-mange omit the lemon-juice, and
mix with the clarified stock an equal proportion of cream (for an
invalid, new milk), with the usual flavouring, and weight of sugar; or
pour the boiling stock very gradually to some finely pounded
almonds, and express it from them as directed for Quince Blamange,
allowing from six to eight ounces to the pint.
Stock, 1 quart; whites of eggs, 5; sugar, 2 oz.; juice, 1 small
lemon: 5 to 8 minutes.
 TO CLARIFY ISINGLASS.

The finely-cut purified isinglass, which is now in general use,

requires no clarifying except for clear jellies: for all other dishes it is
sufficient to dissolve, skim, and pass it through a muslin strainer.
When two ounces are required for a dish, put two and a half into a
delicately clean pan, and pour on it a pint of spring water which has
been gradually mixed with a teaspoonful of beaten white of egg; stir
these thoroughly together, and let them heat slowly by the side of a
gentle fire, but do not allow the isinglass to stick to the pan. When
the scum is well risen, which it will be after two or three minutes’
simmering, clear it off, and continue the skimming until no more
appears; then, should the quantity of liquid be more than is needed,
reduce it by quick boiling to the proper point, strain it through a thin
muslin, and set it by for use: it will be perfectly transparent, and may
be mixed lukewarm with the clear and ready sweetened juice of
various fruits, or used with the necessary proportion of syrup, for
jellies flavoured with choice liqueurs. As the clarifying reduces the
strength of the isinglass—or rather as a portion of it is taken up by
the white of egg—an additional quarter to each ounce must be
allowed for this: if the scum be laid to drain on the back of a fine
sieve which has been wetted with hot water, a little very strong jelly
will drip from it.
Isinglass, 2-1/2 oz.; water, 1 pint; beaten white of egg, 1
teaspoonful.
Obs.—At many Italian warehouses a preparation is now sold
under the name of isinglass, which appears to us to be highly
purified gelatine of some other kind. It is converted without trouble
into a very transparent jelly, is free from flavour, and is less
expensive than the genuine Russian isinglass; but when taken for
any length of time as a restorative, its different nature becomes
perceptible. It answers well for the table occasionally; but it is not
suited to invalids.
 SPINACH GREEN, FOR COLOURING SWEET DISHES,
CONFECTIONARY, OR SOUPS.

Pound quite to a pulp, in a marble or Wedgwood mortar, a handful

or two of young freshly-gathered spinach, then throw it into a hair
sieve, and press through all the juice which can be obtained from it;
pour this into a clean white jar, and place it in a pan of water that is
at the point of boiling, and which must be allowed only to just simmer
afterwards; in three or four minutes the juice will be poached or set:
take it then gently with a spoon, and lay it upon the back of a fine
sieve to drain. If wanted for immediate use, merely mix it in the
mortar with some finely-powdered sugar;[158] but if to be kept as a
store, pound it with as much as will render the whole tolerably dry,
boil it to candy-height over a very clear fire, pour it out in cakes, and
keep them in a tin box or canister. For this last preparation consult
the receipt for orange-flower candy.
158. For soup, dilute it first with a little of the boiling stock, and stir it to the
remainder.
 PREPARED APPLE OR QUINCE JUICE.

Pour into a clean earthen pan two quarts of spring water, and
throw into it as quickly as they can be pared, quartered, and
weighed, four pounds of nonsuches, pearmains, Ripstone pippins, or
any other good boiling apples of fine flavour. When all are done,
stew them gently until they are well broken, but not reduced quite to
pulp; turn them into a jelly-bag, or strain the juice from them without
pressure through a closely-woven cloth, which should be gathered
over the fruit, and tied, and suspended above a deep pan until the
juice ceases to drop from it: this, if not very clear, must be rendered
so before it is used for syrup or jelly, but for all other purposes once
straining it will be sufficient. Quinces are prepared in the same way,
and with the same proportions of fruit and water, but they must not
be too long boiled, or the juice will become red. We have found it
answer well to have them simmered until they are perfectly tender,
and then to leave them with their liquor in a bowl until the following
day, when the juice will be rich and clear. They should be thrown into
the water very quickly after they are pared and weighed, as the air
will soon discolour them. The juice will form a jelly much more easily
if the cores and pips be left in the fruit.
Water, 2 quarts; apples or quinces, 4 lbs.
 COCOA-NUT FLAVOURED MILK.

(For sweet dishes, &c.)

Pare the dark outer rind from a very fresh nut, and grate it on a
fine and exceedingly clean grater, to every three ounces pour a quart
of new milk, and simmer them very softly for three quarters of an
hour, or more, that a full flavour of the nut may be imparted to the
milk without its being much reduced: strain it through a fine sieve, or
cloth, with sufficient pressure to leave the nut almost dry: it may then
be used for blanc-mange, custards, rice, and other puddings, light
cakes and bread.
To each quart new milk, 3 oz. grated cocoa-nut: 3/4 to 1 hour.
Obs.—The milk of the nut when perfectly sweet and good, may be
added to the other with advantage. To obtain it, bore one end of the
shell with a gimlet, and catch the liquid in a cup; and to extricate the
kernel, break the shell with a hammer; this is better than sawing it
asunder.
 COMPÔTES OF FRUIT.

(Or Fruit stewed in Syrup.)

We would especially recommend these delicate and very
agreeable preparations for trial to such of our readers as may be
unacquainted with them, as well as to those who may have a
distaste to the common “stewed fruit” of English cookery. If well
made they are peculiarly delicious and refreshing, preserving the
pure flavour of the fruit of which they are composed; while its acidity
is much softened by the small quantity of water added to form the
syrup in which it is boiled. They are also more economical than tarts
or puddings, and infinitely more wholesome. In the second course
pastry-crust can always be served with them, if desired, in the form
of ready baked leaves, round cakes, or any more fanciful shapes; or
a border of these may be fastened with a little white of egg and flour
round the edge of the dish in which the compôte is served; but rice,
or macaroni simply boiled, or a very plain pudding is a more usual
accompaniment.
Compôtes will remain good for two or three days in a cool store-
room, or somewhat longer, if gently boiled up for an instant a second
time; but they contain generally too small a proportion of sugar to
preserve them from mould or fermentation for many days. The syrup
should be enriched with a larger quantity when they are intended for
the desserts of formal dinners, as it will increase the transparency of
the fruit: the juice is always beautifully clear when the compôtes are
carefully prepared. They should be served in glass dishes, or in
compôtiers, which are of a form adapted to them.
Compôte of spring fruit.—(Rhubarb). Take a pound of the stalks
after they are pared, and cut them into short lengths; have ready a
quarter of a pint of water boiled gently for ten minutes with five
ounces of sugar, or with six should the fruit be very acid; put it in,
and simmer it for about ten minutes. Some kinds will be tender in
rather less time, some will require more.
 Obs.—Good sugar in lumps should be used for these dishes.
Lisbon sugar will answer for them very well on ordinary occasions,
but that which is refined will render them much more delicate.
Compôte of green currants.—Spring water, half-pint; sugar, five
ounces; boiled together ten minutes. One pint of green currants
stripped from the stalks; simmered five minutes.
Compôte of green gooseberries.—This is an excellent compôte if
made with fine sugar, and very good with any kind. Break five
ounces into small lumps and pour on them half a pint of water; boil
these gently for ten minutes, and clear off all the scum; then add to
them a pint of fresh gooseberries freed from the tops and stalks,
washed, and well drained. Simmer them gently from eight to ten
minutes, and serve them hot or cold. Increase the quantity for a large
dish.
Compôte of green apricots.—Wipe the down from a pound of quite
young apricots, and stew them very gently for nearly twenty minutes
in syrup made with eight ounces of sugar and three-quarters of a pint
of water, boiled together the usual time.
Compôte of red currants.—A quarter of a pint of water and five
ounces of sugar: ten minutes. One pint of currants freed from the
stalks to be just simmered in the syrup from five to seven minutes.
This receipt will serve equally for raspberries, or for a compôte of the
two fruits mixed together. Either of them will be found an admirable
accompaniment to a pudding of batter, custard, bread, or ground
rice, and also to various other kinds of puddings, as well as to whole
rice plainly boiled.
Compôte of Kentish or Flemish cherries.—Simmer five ounces of
sugar with half a pint of water for ten minutes; throw into the syrup a
pound of cherries weighed after they are stalked, and let them stew
gently for twenty minutes: it is a great improvement to stone the fruit,
but a larger quantity will then be required for a dish.
Compôte of Morella cherries.—Boil together for fifteen minutes, six
ounces of sugar with half a pint of water; add a pound and a quarter
of ripe Morella cherries, and simmer them very softly from five to
seven minutes: this is a delicious compôte. A larger proportion of
sugar will often be required for it, as the fruit is very acid in some
seasons, and when it is not fully ripe.
Compôte of damsons.—Four ounces of sugar and half a pint of
water to be boiled for ten minutes; one pound of damsons to be
added, and simmered gently from ten to twelve minutes.
Compôte of the green magnum-bonum or Mogul plum.—The
green Mogul plums are often brought abundantly into the market
when the fruit is thinned from the trees, and they make admirable
tarts or compôtes, possessing the fine slight bitter flavour of the
unripe apricot, to which they are quite equal. Measure a pint of the
plums without their stalks, and wash them very clean; then throw
them into a syrup made with seven ounces of sugar in lumps, and
half a pint of water, boiled together for eight or ten minutes. Give the
plums one quick boil, and then let them stew quite softly for about
five minutes, or until they are tender, which occasionally will be in
less time even. Take off the scum, and serve the compôte hot or
cold.
Compôte of the magnum-bonum, or other large plums.—Boil six
ounces of sugar with half a pint of water the usual time; take the
stalks from a pound of plums, and simmer them very softly for twenty
minutes. Increase the proportion of sugar if needed, and regulate the
time as may be necessary for the different varieties of fruit.
Compôte of bullaces.—The large, or shepherds’ bullace, is very
good stewed, but will require a considerable portion of sugar to
render it palatable, unless it be quite ripe. Make a syrup with half a
pound of sugar, and three-quarters of a pint of water, and boil in it
gently from fifteen to twenty minutes, a pint and a half of the bullaces
freed from their stalks.
Compôte of Siberian crabs.—To three-quarters of a pint of water
add six ounces of fine sugar, boil them for ten or twelve minutes, and
skim them well. Add a pound and a half of Siberian crabs without
their stalks, and keep them just at the point of boiling for twenty
minutes; they will then become tender without bursting. A few strips
of lemon-rind and a little of the juice are sometimes added to this
compôte.
 Obs.—In a dry warm summer, when fruit ripens freely, and is rich
in quality, the proportion of sugar directed for these compôtes would
generally be found sufficient; but in a cold or wet season it would
certainly, in many instances, require to be increased. The present
slight difference in the cost of sugars, renders it a poor economy to
use the raw for dishes of this class, instead of that which is well
refined. To make a clear syrup it should be broken into lumps, not
crushed to powder. Almost every kind of fruit may be converted into
a good compôte.
 COMPÔTE OF PEACHES.

Pare half a dozen ripe peaches, and stew them very softly from
eighteen to twenty minutes, keeping them often turned in a light
syrup, made with five ounces of sugar, and half a pint of water boiled
together for ten minutes. Dish the fruit; reduce the syrup by quick
boiling, pour it over the peaches, and serve them hot for a second-
course dish, or cold for rice-crust. They should be quite ripe, and will
be found delicious dressed thus. A little lemon-juice may be added to
the syrup, and the blanched kernels of two or three peach or apricot
stones.
Sugar, 5 oz.; water, 1/2 pint: 10 minutes. Peaches, 6: 18 to 20
minutes.
Obs.—Nectarines, without being pared, may be dressed in the
same way, but will require to be stewed somewhat longer, unless
they be quite ripe.
 ANOTHER RECEIPT FOR STEWED PEACHES.

Should the fruit be not perfectly ripe, throw it into boiling water and
keep it just simmering, until the skin can be easily stripped off. Have
ready half a pound of fine sugar boiled to a light syrup with three-
quarters of a pint of water; throw in the peaches, let them stew softly
until quite tender, and turn them often that they may be equally done;
after they are dished, add a little strained lemon-juice to the syrup,
and reduce it by a few minutes’ very quick boiling. The fruit is
sometimes pared, divided, and stoned, then gently stewed until it is
tender.
Sugar, 8 oz.; water, 3/4 pint: 10 to 12 minutes. Peaches, 6 or 7;
lemon-juice, 1 large teaspoonful.