Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), First Duchess of Chandos, Life and Letters by Rosemary O’Day

Abstract

58 losopher who maintained a consistent and outspoken commitment to ‘‘feminist Country ideology.’’ Sarah Scott assumed the title ‘‘author’’ as ‘‘a merely occasional label’’ and dreamed of transcending ‘‘barriers of gender, geography, genre and status.’’ Ms. Schellenberg’s comparison of the different modes of selffashioning (Sarah Fielding as a ‘‘person of letters’’ and Charlotte Lennox as a ‘‘professional writer’’) provides us with an understanding of ‘‘the interdependent double faces of the modern author.’’ A chapter that compares eighteenthcentury evaluations of less well-known, but also prolific, novel writers—the Minifie sisters and Edward Kimber— argues that the period’s standards of aesthetic value were applied universally , without regard to the author’s gender. The book’s final chapters use Frances Burney as their starting point for a study of the ‘‘strategic naming and forgetting’’ undertaken by women writing literary history in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Ms. Schellenberg’s excellent overview of the mid-century print marketplace questions any simple notion of gender as the primary determinant in a woman author’s career. Like all books that seek to shift a critical paradigm, this one sometimes overstates its case. ‘‘If I have succeeded at all,’’ writes Ms. Schellenberg, ‘‘we may find new ways to talk about mid-eighteenth-century women writers—as variously ambitious, variously professionalized, variously influential—even, as interesting.’’ The book implies, at times, that critics who study sexism reify women as passive victims, whereas those who focus their attention on other concerns restore purposeful agency to them, an opposition that depreciates the complex assessments of power and powerlessness provided by an earlier generation of critics. In attending to the gap between ‘‘the eighteenth-century evidence and the late twentieth-century perspective,’’ Ms. Schellenberg perhaps underestimates the extent to which all historical narratives are shaped by contemporary concerns; it behooves us to reflect on our critical investments in relation to the present, as well as the past—especially in a book as polemical as this. Ms. Schellenberg has thrown down the gauntlet, and it will be interesting to see how critics writing on eighteenth-century women authors in the years ahead respond to her challenge . Alison Conway University of Western Ontario ROSEMARY O’DAY. Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), First Duchess of Chandos , Life and Letters. Woodbridge: Boydell , 2007. Pp. viii ⫹ 442. $145; £75. In eighteenth-century history, politics and patronage, James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (1674–1744), protégé of the powerful general, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, is an interesting case study. (I was so intrigued that I wrote his biography Portrait of a Patron. The Patronage and Collecting of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (1674–1744), Ashgate, 2007.) At his right hand, and clearly a figure worthy of study in her own right, is his second wife, his cousin, Lady Cassandra Willoughby (1670–1735). In 1713, Cassandra gave up her single life of housekeeping for her brother to marry at forty-three, and her dowry provided the money—£23,000—for her new husband to expand his country house at Cannons, now the site of North London Collegiate Girls’ School. Cassandra’s 59 experience, good taste, economic independence , and her importance to the political and artistic activities of her husband , are Ms. O’Day subjects. Although Joan Johnson’s short biography Excellent Cassandra (Stroud, 1981) is out of print, Ms. O’Day’s is not a new biography of the Duchess, but an annotated volume of ‘‘all known extant letters’’ taken from three principal archives : Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office, Stratford-upon-Avon; North London Collegiate School; and the Huntington Library. The letters are compelling documents of an early eighteenth-century, well-connected, family -oriented noblewoman, and Ms. O’Day contextualizes them well in her excellent Introduction. She evaluates the recent scholarship relating to the role of women in areas assumed to be traditional male preoccupations, for instance patronage networks and financial investments . Duchess Cassandra stated that the purpose of her marriage was to be useful to her family and to further their interests . To this end, she sought from her husband political and other posts for her relatives, mediating between them and the Duke. She also applied herself to matchmaking...