Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir.” by Caroline Breashears

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir.” by Caroline Breashears Neil Guthrie Caroline Breashears. Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the “Scandalous Memoir.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii + 121. $54.99. The first half of this short book discusses two “scandalous memoirists” from our period, Frances Hawes (later Viscountess Vane) and her less well-known friend, Françoise-Thérèse de La Touche. The latter’s Apologie (1736), translated as the Appeal of Madame La T—to the Publick in 1741, anticipates in many ways the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality (1751), the more-or-less factual history of Lady Vane that is embedded in Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle. Ms. Breashears points out that the two women’s stories differ in significant respects from those of Teresia Constantia Phillips and Laetitia Pilkington, the scandalous memoirists who now get the most critical airplay. Unlike them, Madame de La Touche and Lady Vane came from moneyed, if compromised, backgrounds; both were the daughters of disgraced financiers. Their narratives are framed not as apologies and were not written for money. La Touche and Vane celebrate their amorous exploits rather than seek to justify them, and they hold money in contempt. The book then turns to Lady Vane’s Memoirs in more detail, arguing that they represent an innovative collaboration with Smollett. Ms. Breashears has no new evidence for the authorship of the Memoirs, but it is difficult to question her assumption that Lady Vane provided at least the raw materials to Smollett (and perhaps a draft) because she wanted to find a “sympathetic” and noncommercial vehicle for making her case. Ms. Breashears [End Page 68] also plausibly suggests that Smollett was willing to take this on board because he wished both to corroborate his fiction by capturing real life and to adumbrate aspects of Pickle’s own story with a nonfictional narrative. Both narratives are concerned with mercantile origins, loss of status, disinheritance, the struggle of self against society, and the trials of love (including love triangles). These parallels have been pointed out in the past—as long ago as 1945, by Rufus Putney, and occasionally since—but the point has not met with universal acceptance, and therefore bears reiteration. The picaresque narrative and the female scandalous memoir are, for Ms. Breashears, not so different in their incidents and themes, although they differ in their endings. Peregrine’s story is ultimately one of restoration and reintegration, while Lady Vane is obliged to return to an oppressive husband who effectively imprisons her. For Ms. Breashears, “Such differences affirm the importance of gender in shaping lives as well as plots.” Neil Guthrie University of Toronto Copyright © 2018 W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, Kellye Corcoran, Melanie Holm, J. T. Parnell, David Venturo, and Donald R. Wehrs