A Response to Mary Poovey's "Recovering Ellen Pickering"

Abstract

Mary Poovey's work has moved steadily away from its early 1980s starting point in the study of women writers. Her first book, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, placed her among the most intelligent and influential of the scholars who pioneered feminist literary criticism in the late 1970s and early 1980s by writing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women novelists, a group that also included Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ellen Moers, Elaine Showalter, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. But the jacket of her most recent book, A History of the Modern Fact, acknowledges only her recent historical studies, Uneven Developments and Making a Social Body, as if readers were being asked to forget The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. 1 Indeed, the first chapter of A History of the Modern Fact explains its author's choice no longer to attend to women writers or even to the "ideological work of gender" (the subtitle of Uneven Developments). Although she still wishes to be identified as a feminist critic, Poovey is concerned now to explore what she sees as larger issues of which gendered meanings make up only a phase. For her, the "production of knowledge" is the fundamental object of study, and "before it will be possible to position accounts of the gendering of knowledge (for example) in relation to the kind of epistemological developments that enabled white men to divide up and discipline knowledge, we need more work on those epistemological developments themselves" (A History of the Modern Fact, 24), work of the kind she does in the book she is introducing.