Intellectual Tacking: Questions of Education in the Works of Isabelle de Charrière (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 373 the metaphorical" (p. 165). Two of the editors, Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross, study Swift's place in the English syllabus at Trinity College, Dublin, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since he was made to serve the competing ends of imperialist pedagogy and aesthetic transcendence, they propose a greater "critical consciousness both of the historical circumstances in which texts are produced and of the institutional situations in which they presently circulate" (p. 179). The final essay, by Carole Fabricant, anticipates the reverberation of Swift's texts well beyond the classroom. Trenchantly "placing particular emphasis on the progressive aspects of Swift's thought" (p. 200), she notices their emergence even within his more conservative contexts, which should counter the conventional view of his politics. Whether he is representative or indeed accurate in the details of his Irish patriotism matters less than the overarching analysis of colonialism he projects. In this sense, Fabricant, closing the collection, responds (though not overtly) to Connolly's opening: Swift offers a potent legacy for the future that progressives hope to shape, whatever the flaws in using him as a window upon the past. Their implicit but provocative disagreement makes a fine stimulant at the close ofan exemplary collection, and bodes well for the liveliness ofthe continuing scholarly debate on Swift. Robert Mahony Catholic University of America Jacqueline Letzter. Intellectual Tacking: Questions of Education in the Works ofIsabelle de Charrière. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Éditions Rodopi, 1998. 217pp. HA170; US$36.50. ISBN 90-420-0290-5. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the work and life of Isabelle de Charrière. Two comprehensive biographies, by CP. Courtney and Raymond Trousson, appeared in 1993 and 1994 respectively, and the Modern Language Association's publication of a paperback edition of the Lettres de Mistriss Henley both in French and in English translation (1993) has made it possibleto incorporate Charrière into the undergraduate curriculum. Her current standing may be gauged by the fact that she is presented to the non-specialist readership of the New York Review ofBooks in PN. Furbank's essay "A Finished Woman" (15 January 1998, pp. 46^8). The pleasure of reading about a French eighteenth-century woman writer in a manistream publication is, however, tempered by the fact that Furbank confines his discussion to a review of the re-edition of Geoffrey Scott's The Portrait of Zélide (1925). Like Scott's book, Furbank's essay is predominantly biographical, dwelling on Charrière's relationships with famous men rather than on her achievements as a writer. With the exception of a passing reference to Courtney, it does not mention any of the recent criticism on Charrière, much of which has been produced by feminist scholars such as Carla Hesse, Susan Lanser, 374 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:3 and Joan Stewart, an omission that suggests a deliberate wish to overlook the recent boom in Charrière studies because of its connection to the emergence of feminist literary history. The failure to adopt a textual approach leads to inaccurate generalizations about Charrière's political views, notably the dismissive claim that because ofthe "weary cynicism" that she experienced as a woman intellectual in a male-dominated society, she came to dismiss "action for the public good as a sham and a chimera and the French Revolution as a sordid farce" (p. 48). The fact that it remains possible to approach a woman writer in exclusively biographical terms in a prestigious and widely circulatingjournal illustrates thecontinuing need for studies which, like Jacqueline Letzter's Intellectual Tacking: Questions ofEducation in the Works of Isabelle de Charrière, undertake to provide a comprehensive and detailed account of Charrière's œuvre. Intellectual Tacking differs from three other recent feminist studies ofCharrière, by Jenene Allison, Kathleen Jaeger, and Medha Karmarkar, in that it focuses on a single theme: the author's lifelong concern with the issue ofwomen's education. It documents Charrière's writing on education from the publication ofher firstmature novel, the Lettres neuchâteloises (1784), to her last text, the Lettres de Walter Finch à son fils William (1799), delving into the plays and political pamphlets...