Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot Anne Mallory Elizabeth Sabiston , Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. 214 pp. Elizabeth Sabiston's book takes up a scene central to the history of feminist scholarship: a heroine, circumscribed not least by gender, acquires agency through artistic, often literary, expression. It is easy to understand the attraction this scenario holds for feminist critics, above and beyond its self-reflexivity. As a common literary story and, for many women, a life story, it may have played a part in motivating many of us to become scholars. Having witnessed, in the last four decades, efforts to define and explore the category of "women's writing," in today's critical climate we may be less inclined to create narratives that group nineteenth-century women writers into a straightforward trajectory of artistic or personal development. [End Page 417] Private Sphere to World Stage examines works by five British novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. Sabiston argues for a strong lineage derived from these authors' sense of themselves as living in a world that begrudges women the pleasures and powers associated with artistic production. She has selected these works because she believes they share a preoccupation with women's writing and its ability to affect the world. As she asserts in the book's conclusion, "The most important factor linking the five women novelists is their movement, however tentative, provisional, and anonymous, from private sphere to public" (190). The opening chapter focuses on Austen's Northanger Abbey and Persuasion as defenses of the woman novelist's craft; each contains a "buried manifesto" (3). After a discussion of mentorship in Northanger Abbey, Sabiston turns to the oft-cited passage, "Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body." She uses this defense of the novel form, as practiced by women, to set up a reading of Persuasion that emphasizes the gradual development of Anne Elliot's creative abilities: "discipline, detachment, shrewd observation of others" (33). Sabiston analyzes at length the scene at the White Hart in which Anne's semi-public defense of women's constancy — a speech that counters conventional masculine histories — prompts Captain Wentworth to drop his pen (33). By the novel's end, she argues, Anne "has moved from private sphere to public and becomes an eloquent defender (to an all-male audience) of the female point of view in literature" (56). In Chapter Two, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre takes up the pen that Captain Wentworth drops. Having recounted some familiar ideas about the color red and the meanings of "eyre," Sabiston embarks on a valuable discussion of Jane's knack for narrative. Reflecting on the manner in which Jane's abilities develop, Sabiston makes the excellent point that the novel which "begins with Jane Eyre's book being flung as a weapon at John Reed's head" ends "with Jane Rochester's book, the book that she has written, directed more gently and compellingly at the reader, at a more appreciative and receptive public that will be complicitous rather than compelled against its will" (80). Jane's manuscript allows her to move from isolation toward community, since "in writing from her heart as well as her conscience, she emerges from the private sphere and speaks to other women over a span of many generations" (81). The chapter ends with an interesting, though underdeveloped, discussion of Brontë's influence on Herman Melville and Leo Tolstoy. Under the heading, "Charlotte Brontë: Only a Women's Novelist?" Sabiston suggests that Melville may have named Edward Fairfax Vere, the captain in his short story "Billy Budd," after Brontë's Edward Fairfax Rochester, and notes that Vere is also the surname of Georgiana Reed's suitor, Lord Edwin Vere. She goes on to make an intriguing comparison between Brontë's novel and Tolstoy's "Happy Ever After," which also features a female narrator and a silenced governess. Sabiston argues for an important distinction: while Brontë empowers her female narrator, Tolstoy disempowers his. [End Page 418] Sabiston reads Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as a novel in which "female literariness" challenges...