Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work and Culture ed. by Linda V. Troost, and: Women Writing 1550–1750 ed. by Jo Wallwork, Paul Salzman (review)

Abstract

MLR, 105.1, 2010 203 Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in theirLives,Work, and Culture, vol. v. Ed. by Linda V. Troost. New York: AMS. 2008. x+326 pp. $124.50. ISBN 978 0-404-64705-6. Eighteenth-Century Women is an annual essay collection with a few reviews, now up to its fifth volume. Although the subjects engage with different areas, the whole enterprise reminds one of the need?perhaps increasing in an age of gender studies?to think about women aswomen. Several essays deal with representations ofwomen bymen. Charles Haskell Hinnant looks at allegorical portraits ofRestora tion court beauties, particularly Sir Peter Lely's depictions of Barbara Villiers, in the light of political and sexual currents swirling round their sitters' reputations, to illuminate their complicated public postures. JuliaDabbs looks at stories about Italian women artists?Giovanna Fratellini, Maria Barbo (aminiaturist), and Ros alba Carriera?to show that 'therewas a price that thewoman artist paid forbeing gifted, at least according to her male biographers, and thatwas ugliness' (p. 37). Logan JamesConnors reads a couple of plays byMarivaux and Diderot topropose that the former has amore gynocentric dynamic, though his discussion of female agency on stage is so lightly contextualized?there isnothing about the process of production or reception?that more questions are raised than answered. The other essays are on stronger ground with a different sort of suggestiveness?discussions ofwomen's lives are used to frame discussion ofworks, and vice versa. One might wish for more explicit theorizing of relations between lives,works, and culture but thematerials do supplymuch practical food for thought.Marilyn Francus's careful study of Elizabeth Allen Burney, Frances Burney's stepmother, iswittily entitled 'Stepmommy Dearest', and makes a persuasive case for a woman who deserves a better press than she got from the Burney offspring. The essays do not overtly have much in common, apart from a general commit ment to eighteenth-century women, but the volume does set up some interesting resonances. An essay by Pam Lieske on Magdalen House narratives and their sig nificance for Frances Sheridan's life and Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph keeps fallen women in view; though Lieske reads the novel rather debatably as rela tively closed to ambiguity, the ideological charge around prostitution is felt. It resurfaces in Laura Engel's essay on Mary Wells, around mad women. Wells's life was extraordinary?theatrical on stage and off, she puzzled and frustrated her contemporaries: was she mad? Or acting mad? When she retreated at one point to the north coast ofNorfolk, the locals took her forMarie Antoinette: how else to explain beauty, elegance, rich clothes, and broken English? Lieske comments: 'Wells's mockery ofmajesty reflects her own desire to be worshipped at the same time thather subversive performance demonstrates that theperception of royalty is artificial?anyone can play a queen' (p. 200). Queens, fallenwomen, mad women? women's agency is fragile in the eighteenth century, and both fallen women and mad women were likely to have their children taken away. Olympe de Gouges and Germaine de Stael fly the flag for powerful intellectual women?the former's play VEntree du Dumouriez a Bruxelles, described as a la 204 Reviews Shakespeare' by one reviewer (and not approvingly!), is discussed byMegan Con way as a chauvinist epic, which failed on the stage in part because of the authors vigorous stand against the execution of Louis XVI. When Dumouriez defected to theAustrians later in 1793, an 'unfortunate choice of protagonists', as Conway puts it (p. 235) saw de Gouge herself condemned to the guillotine. The French Revo lution provides Madelyn Gurtwith with two further occasions to discuss women's agency: Chenier's play about Charles IX which associated Marie-Antoinette ne gatively with theMedici, and Francois Chabot versus Claire Lacombe in a fierce rhetorical clash.What Gutwith calls 'small but smoldering' (p. 237) moments par ticularize the expulsion ofwomen from public life in republic and monarchy That sets up nicely the final essay, by Barbara Ann Day-Hickman, on de StaeT's relations with du Pont de Nemours, a fellow liberal and friendwho proved unsympathetic about her exile and her troubles; tactlessly he wrote thathe wished he had her time to...