Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 by Orianne Smith

Abstract

Orianne Smith. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786-1826. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 293. $95. Situated between studies of millenarianism's class consciousness and the feminist reappraisal of women's writing in the Romantic period, Orianne Smith's Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786-1826 argues that not only was visionary, apocalyptic writing undertaken by women as well as men, but this writing is a complex form of social protest. Part secular, part sacred, sometimes catastrophic in orientation, sometimes progressive, such writing was a means by which women attempted to achieve world-historical relevance at a time when patriarchal institutions afforded them few if any legitimate opportunities for expression. Perhaps ironically, it is the flexibility rather than univocity of what Ian Balfour has called the that proves, in Smith's analysis, especially important to its generic coherence. Thanks to their hermeneutic resourcefulness--or, according to critics, a typological excess productive of deranged and manic exegesis (14)--prophets, speaking in the same style as each other, might read the same historical event in radically different ways. Take the French Revolution. For Dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, Helen Maria Williams, and [Anna] Barbauld, and Dissenting sympathizers like Wollstonecraft, progressive millennialism [spurred by the Revolution] brought with it a renewed faith in the eventual abolition of slavery, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the eradication of gender inequality (17). At the same time, Anglicans such as Joseph Galloway and Hannah More believed that the events across the channel signaled something like the beginning of Armageddon (19). What Smith's work reveals, then, is that thanks to the prophetic mode women were capable of participating in debates about nationalism, religion, and world history in ways that cannot be homogenized. Smith argues, instead, that what these writers share is a turn to illocutionary speech act, a kind of saying that accomplishes--or tries to accomplish--what it announces through its mode of performance (23). Thus, promising and cursing do not merely describe situations but manifest a political and social intent in the very fact of their utterance. Over the course of six compact chapters and a brief Epilogue, Smith explores the specific practices of five very different Romantic women writers engaged in political (33), situating their performative prophetic writing within larger cultural and artistic trends in the later eighteenth century including acts of improvisation, the discourse of sympathy, the Gothic genre, and moral philosophy. In her first chapter, Verbal magic: an etymology of female enthusiasm, Smith looks back to the sectarian female prophets of the English Civil War to contextualize prophetic writing and practice by women in Romanticism. In spite of enthusiasm's bad reputation--cemented during the Restoration--and its generally diminished cultural currency in the more sober eighteenth century, Smith argues that Romantic women prophets draw on these precursors and participate in a of such writing. The use of the word 'tradition' here and elsewhere is deliberate (6), Smith insists early on, situating the phenomenon of female prophecy within the controversy between tradition and right as two different grounds of authority. Female prophecy, for Smith, draws its power from both sides. Because women from Hester Lynch Piozzi to Helen Maria Williams to Mary Shelley situated themselves with the prophetic tradition, Smith argues, their claims to political legitimacy carried more weight with Burkeans and other conservative thinkers. At the same time, Smith stresses that the performative nature of prophetic writing bases its authority in its autonomy: like a rights claim, female prophecy is expressed by fiat and makes a transcendental gesture beyond any limiting (and often discouraging, patriarchal) tradition. …