Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies, and Philip Shaw, eds., Literature and Authenticity, 1780-1900: Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey (Ashgate, 2011) xi + 230 $99.95 Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan, eds., Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity (Palgrave 2010) 268 + x [pounds sterling]52.50/$84.00 The appearance of two collections--Literature and Authenticity, 1780-1900 and Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity--on sincerity and authenticity signal that they are central issues, relevant to a variety of writers and genres, in current scholarship on 19th century and especially Romantic texts. Both books are important collections with many strong essays by established and rising scholars. Literature and Authenticity, 1780-1900 consists of fourteen essays on writers ranging from Cowper (addressed by both Michael Davies in the first and Ashley Chantler in the last essay), Byron (in essays by Bernard Beatty and Philip W. Martin), Keats (Nicholas Roe), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Michael O'Neill), a number of Romantic-era women poets writing on India (A. R. Kidwai), and among Victorian or later subjects, John Ruskin (Keith Hanley), Elizabeth Gaskell (essays by Joanne Shattock and Nick Davis), the actor Henry Irving's 1892 production of King Lear (Richard Foulkes), American writers Henry David Thoreau and Robert Greeley (Geoff Ward), and Joseph Conrad (along with Cowper in Ashley Chantler's essay). Philip Davis's essay cites many different writers and texts including Pilgrim's Progress, Matthew Arnold, the Book of Job, George Herbert, Fulke Greville, Saul Bellow, William Hazlitt, and Adam Ferguson, among others. The variety of writers, genres, and time periods (including later in the 20th century), along with the high quality of each essay, make for an engaging collection that sustains interest from start to finish. I felt that I learned something valuable about many different figures, both those within and outside of my areas of expertise. What links the various essays is the topic of authenticity that all address, though some more explicitly and centrally than others. One of those who most directly engages the topic is Joanne Shattock in "The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell." Shattock challenges the common assumption that letters are a reliable source of a writer's true self in a way her fiction is not. Instead, Shattock argues that Gaskell's letters present an identity shaped and constructed much as her fiction is, a claim she supports by noting parallel passages in letters and in Gaskell's magazine essays and short stories. Philip W. Martin's "Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying" claims that Canto XIV of Don Juan reveals a shift in Byron's attitude toward truth. Earlier statements in Don Juan confidently claim the poem is grounded in reality, identified with human weakness and brutality, but in Canto XIV the narrator is less certain of how to distinguish truth from falsehood. Martin concludes that "The factual aesthetic of Don Juan ... is not foresworn, but it is somewhat muted into a more complex, more resigned consideration of fiction's limited possibilities" (90). Bernard Beatty's "Authenticity Projected: Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal Newman" claims all three writers in his title shared a similar understanding of authenticity based not on an inviolable inner self but on, among other traits, "the primacy of action in life and of performative action in writing" (80). For Beatty, the major turning point in Byron's career comes with Manfred, particularly the protagonist's last words ("Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die"), for these "wholly coincide with an action which lets his self go" and render Manfred "one who acts, rather than ... an actor" (74). Michael Davies's "Authentic Narratives: Cowper and Conversion" notes that Cowper's spiritual autobiography, Adelphi, offers a narrative of ecstatic conversion similar to that in Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. …