"Catching the Drift." Authority, Gender, and Narrative Strategy in Fiction: By Laura Tracy. New Brunswick, NJ/London: Rutgers University Press, 1988. 229 pp.

Patients talk, analysts listen; writers write, readers read. Within this grid of human activity a new literary criticism can be plotted, according to Laura Tracy in "Catching the Drift." Tracy examines the novels of Jean Rhys, Ford Maddox Ford, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jane Austen, with briefer forays into the short stories of the contemporary writers Grace Paley and Alice Munro. She employs an often bewildering combination of psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader response theories to fashion her argument:

Transference guides the relationship between the analysand and analyst, as the former perceives the latter through a screen of unconscious conflicts and desires originally experienced with important figures in early childhood. In brief, transference means unconsciously fictionalizing the present according to a narrative created in the past… Similarly, writers imagine, consciously and unconsciously, readers for their work (p. 188).

This review focuses on Tracy's arguments about Jane Austen; however, the problems she runs into with Austen are inherent in her general theoretical approach, and so resurface with all the writers she deals with: "to understand the transferred attitudes Austen brought to her imagined reader, then, one must first examine the ruptures in her canon, through which ideas excluded from her conscious awareness are visible" (p. 138). While noting a number of "anomalies" in Austen's work, she focuses on the omniscient narrator, who frequently paraphrases crucial dialogue or inner reflections of the heroine, or offers general reflections on