Broadview Press Starts Freehand Books

Broadview Press has shored up their literary list with the creation of a new imprint, Freehand Books. The first four books in the series are Good to a Fault, the second novel by Marina Endicott, a renowned Canadian writer; It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems, by Jeanette Lynes, an up and coming poet in Canada; Pathologies: Essays by Susan Olding, an award-winning writer; Mother Superior: Stories, by Saleema Nawaz, a Montreal writer who writes stories that are steeped in sexuality.

In addition to Freehand Books, Broadview continues to publish classics and lesser known literature in attractive, comprehensive editions. Notable this season is Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century, edited by Laura J. Rosenthal, a professor of English at University of Maryland, College Park. This provocative anthology includes fiction and nonfiction, some written by prostitutes themselves. There are high and low courtesans represented here, from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. “Offering a range of narratives from the conservative and reformist to the unabashedly libertine, this book provides a fascinating alternative look into eighteenth-century culture.”

From 1752 we have what is called an “it-narrative,” written in this case from the perspective of a lap-dog. The History of Pompey the Little, by Francis Coventry, who was a British novelist. There are no competing editions of this book. The appendices include material from Samuel Johnson, poems by the author, and essays on animal rights.

Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798 and 1800, is by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Both editions are represented here in their entirety, and the 1800 expanded edition has no competition. Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are both included, and this was the book that helped launch the Romantic era. The appendices has reviews, including a piece by William Hazlitt, correspondence, and poems Coleridge originally intended for Lyrical Ballads. This is a ground-breaking collection by two of Britsih literature’s greatest poets.

Another book with no competing edition is A Sunless Heart, by Edith Johnstone. From 1895, this is a proto-lesbian novel about a “romantic friendship” between two women. Called “a startling re-discovery from the late-Victorian era,” it explores issues of race, sexuality, and class in melodramatic, compelling prose. The appendices explore early notions of lesbianism and homosexuality, including A. Hamilton, Civil Responsibility of Sexual Perverts, American Journal of Insanity (1896), and Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (1901).

We also have an autobiography of an early feminist and her militant struggle to gain the vote for women. Prisons and Prisoners: Some Personal Experiences(1914), by Constance Lytton. Lytton was the granddaughter of the famous Lytton, and when she was imprisoned as a suffragette they let her go because of her aristocratic background. Next time she was arrested she pretended to be a commoner, and she chronicles being forcibly fed while on hunger strike, an act that permanently damaged her health. However, Lytton became the pioneer of a singular movement in the history of women’s and prisoner’s rights. The appendices include further writing by Lytton, and primary documents from the suffragette women’s movement.