Jane West and the Politics of Reading

Abstract

The dedication of fiction to political purposes in fact defines the literary production of both radicals and conservatives in the 1790s as they contested for the allegiance of an audience envisioned as peculiarly susceptible to calls for institutional change. Jane West’s determination to contrive fictions capable of ‘rousing the stronger energies of the mind’ in order to defeat Jacobin principles, however, stands in potential conflict with the idealization of private life and female inwardness her works enforce — an ideal centred on the notion that ‘virtues shunned observation, and only courted the silent plaudit of conscience’. In each of the novels written in the 1790s — The Advantages of Education: or, the History of Maria Williams (1793), A Gossip’s Story (1796), and A Tale of the Times (1799) — the conflict is resolved by invoking the ‘muse of history’ in aid of ‘the muse of fiction’. Constructing the discourse of private life in accordance with the model afforded by linear history allows her obliquely to confirm its consonance with the forces of tradition and continuity. But investing the quotidian with exemplary status also, and more problematically, grants to culturally marginalized women political significance. The desire to harmonize these competing impulses shapes West’s commitment to the education of her female readers. This chapter considers how attention to genre and history finally enables West to address the intersections of private and public in terms consistent with her advocacy of ‘things as they are’.