His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature by Ann Messenger

Abstract

#4046, for 4538 read 4530; *4171 and nineteen other entries, for 4183 read 4176. In Gissing’s The Emancipated, the enthusiastic Reuben Elgar praises the “nineteenth century . . . its special opportunities and demands and character­ istics,” and wishes he could convey them to the “intelligence” of his puri­ tanical sister. Good bibliographies can often open up a period or the works of an author as well as a critical or biographical study. Elgar would have been pleased with, and would have found much food for thought in, these three volumes. r ic h a r d m o r t o n / McMaster University Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986). ix, 271. $26.00 (u.s.) For about a decade, feminist critics have been remapping the terrain of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. Janet Todd, Katharine Rog­ ers, and others have published wide-ranging surveys of women writers of the period, demonstrating the astonishing variety and vigour of their work. Jane Spencer and Dale Spender have written books on the early women novelists; monographs on novelists such as Eliza Haywood, Frances Brooke, Ann Radcliffe , Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney are appearing in rapid suc­ cession; and Pandora, Virago, and Oxford presses are reissuing early women novelists at the rate of a dozen a year. Dramatists such as Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Polwhele, Susanna Centlivre, Delariviere Manley, and Frances Brooke are being rediscovered, and the old chestnut of women having been excluded from the male-dominated world of the theatre is being laid to rest. Even women poets are beginning to receive some attention, as scholars retrieve their manuscripts from oblivion: Isobel Grundy and Ruth Perry, for example, have made the poetic works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Astell available for the first time. The purpose of Ann Messenger’s stimulating book is to study some women writers in relation to their better-known male contemporaries. The “His” of her title are, together with Crashaw and Milton, an august group of Augustans — Dryden, Southeme, Addison and Steele, Pope, Gay, Ambrose Philips, and Johnson; the “Hers” are Anne Killigrew, Aphra Behn, the Countess of Winchilsea, Lady Montagu, Eliza Haywood, Frances Brooke, Anna Barbauld, and Ellis Cornelia Knight. Spanning over a hundred years of women’s writing, from Killigrew’s collected poems (1686) to Barbauld’s 100 poems of the 1790s and early 1800s, IIis and Hers excludes women drama­ tists but includes poets, novelists, and essayists. Seven of the eight women authors seem to me of considerable interest. Barbauld might more fruitfully have been represented as a literary critic (her 200-page study of Richardson remains one of the best ever written on the novelist), and one might question the choice of Knight’s Dinarbas (1790) in a decade that saw the publication of all of Radcliffe’s novels, Burney’s Camilla, and Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent . By placing men and women writers side by side, Messenger hopes “ to shed some light in both directions” (5) ; this, however, is the least successful part of her enterprise. In chapter I, for example, comparing Dryden’s encomiastic Ode to Anne Killigrew with Killigrew’s own poetic achievement, Messenger adds little to the protracted critical debate over Dryden’s poem; instead, she rightly concentrates her energies on the grotesquely neglected subject of his tribute. In other chapters, male poets are included for comparative purposes: a study of Lady Winchilsea’s original and complex “To the Nightingale,” for example, glances briefly at nightingale poems by Grashaw and Ambrose Philips, but is primarily a deft close reading of Winchilsea’s poem. A brisk survey of Barbauld’s poetry, similarly, considers some intriguing allusions to Milton and Pope, without attempting to offer fresh insights into these target figures. While Messenger’s refusal to isolate women writers from the literary “mainstream” is certainly justifiable, her analyses of male writers are gen­ erally superficial. Chapter II, comparing Southerne’s dramatic version of Oroonoko with Behn’s novella, devotes equal space to the two authors, but Messenger’s sympathies are clearly with Behn, the moving power of whose fiction is contrasted with the frivolity of Southerne’s “entertainment...