Gender at Work: Four Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century ed. by Ann Messenger

Abstract

Ann Messenger, ed., Gender at Work: Four Women Writers of the Eight­ eenth Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990). 163. $29.95 U.S. Gender at Work is not so much a collection of essays as it is that quintessentially feminist form, a group project. Its four participants, each connected in some way with Simon Fraser University, set out to do two things: to restore to light four neglected women writers and to contribute to the cur­ rent debate on gender and discourse. This debate Ann Messenger, in her “Introduction,” summarizes in two questions: do the different genders write differently, and how does gender manifest itself in literature? The writers assume that the goal of revival will be accomplished in the course of their four essays. Their second goal they aim to attain through two approaches: by testing women’s writing against that of men, and by practical criticism of individual women writers. The subjects have been chosen not to be rep­ resentative of eighteenth-century women writers, but to represent a variety of genres and class origins. We are also told in the Introduction that each of the four essays will produce a positive result: gender does make a difference. The first essay is Messenger’s own, a comparison between the work of William Shenstone and his protegee, the young pastoral poet Mary Whateley (later Darwall) (1738-1825), whose Original Poems on Several Occa­ sions (1764) appeared in the same year as Shenstone’s Works in Verse and Prose. Messenger begins with a demonstration of the many similarities in background between Shenstone and Whateley that, almost scientifically, en­ able a valid comparison of their work. The only significant differences she finds are age (Shenstone was twenty-four years older), gender, and temper­ ament. On the last point, I personally found myself wondering whether an eighteenth-century middle-class woman’s six children are not evidence more of her fertility and good relations with her husband than of her “energetic” temperament. The comparison on which Messenger then embarks between the work of the two poets is fascinating, but very brief. The most interesting and convincing comparisons reveal Whateley’s modest sense of the purpose of poetry and of herself as a poet, and her innovative use of the genres of imitation and pastoral elegy. Although Messenger refers both to her own previously published work on Whateley and to her forthcoming biography, I would have enjoyed much more extensive discussion of Whateley’s poetry in this place. Messenger also could have discussed much more fully her intriguing claim that Whateley’s second book of verse, as Mrs. Darwall in 1794, reveals the significant influence of her changed marital status. 367 I came away from Messenger’s essay wanting very much to be as convinced by her claim that Mary Whateley Darwall was a better poet than William Shenstone, as I was that Whateley DarwalPs gender made a significant dif­ ference, but I was unable to confirm myself in this belief. Messenger rightly states in her “Introduction” that the goal of restoring to light the work of “unjustly neglected women writers . . . needs no explanation or justification” ; however, a revival of interest must be accompanied by making the work of these women available to readers. Only four of Mary Whateley Darwall’s poems have, to my knowledge, been anthologized, and her work is available at only a handful of North American libraries. Surely the republication of Whateley Darwall’s work is at least as necessary as Messenger’s forthcoming biography. She might consider adding at least a section of complete poems to that work. Unfortunately, the general unpopularity of pastoral poetry in the twentieth century would probably be a considerable stumbling block to the reappearance in print of the works of this deserving poet. Fortunately, availability is not a significant issue for the three other women writers ex­ amined in Gender at Work, the poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), the playwright Mary Pix (1666-1709), and the autobiographer Laetitia Pilkington (1712-50). I was, at first, somewhat wary of the three exercises in practical criticism, not because of the choice of subjects, but because of the qualifications of the...