The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding

Abstract

197 difficulties posed by Mr. Prince’s dense argument. What does the evidence of this hypothetical model suggest about Mr. Prince’s analysis of the genre, about the way he has constructed his narrative, and about the limitations of his overall approach? To begin with, the book appears to be more narrowly focused than its title suggests, for it concentrates on religious dialogues, more specifically, on the clash between ‘‘Christian Neoplatonism ’’ and philosophical skepticism . It thus overlooks dialogues (Hobbes’s A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, 1681), that are devoted to other topics. Similar constraints may have compelled Mr. Prince to omit consideration of the Cambridge Platonists from his discussion of Neoplatonism in the opening chapter, their obvious influence on Shaftesbury and perhaps even Berkeley notwithstanding . He might have cited Henry More’s Divine Dialogues (1674) as a rudimentary prototype of the eighteenth-century dialogue on religion and noted that Shaftesbury appropriated the term ‘‘plastic Nature’’ in his unpublished essay on the Judgment of Hercules from Ralph Cudworth. Mr. Prince later reports in a footnote to an intriguing chapter on the Platonic revival that he located more than thirty separately issued translations, imitations, or discussions of Plato, Xenophon, and Plotinus between 1730 and 1755, but they are not listed in an Appendix. In his truncated history of the dialogue , Mr. Prince traces a pattern of rise and fall, in which rational theology ultimately fails to overcome the skepticism that continually menaces it. The quest for universal norms is thereby displaced onto the new discourse of aesthetics , in which beauty rather than truth becomes the object of inquiry, and onto an emergent genre of prose fiction, the novel, that deals in probabilities rather than certainties. While the digital reprint makes this elegantly constructed argument available to students, what led me through the text were Prince’s incisive and penetrating analyses of Berkeley, Hume, and Ramsay. At the same time, I wish Mr. Prince had been allowed a brief preface to the second edition. In it, he might have taken account of works published on the philosophical dialogue since 1996, especially Timothy Dykstal ’s important The Luxury of Skepticism : Politics, Philosophy and Dialogue in the English Public Sphere, 1660– 1740 (Virginia, 2001). Charles H. Hinnant The University of Missouri-Columbia SARAH FIELDING. The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy, ed. Candace Ward. Peterborough, Ont. Broadview , 2005. Pp. 242. $14.95. Frequently characterized as one of the first children’s books, The Governess has important implications for adults. It offers a model for childhood education with sources in Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education and a subdued call for reforms in the education of young women with affinities to those proposed by the two great Marys— Astell and Wollstonecraft. It went through four editions between 1749 and 1758, and extracts from it appeared in anthologies of children’s stories through the 1920s. The story is about nine students of Miss Teachum who, in the course of a ‘‘communal bildungsroman,’’ grow beyond their initial moral failings in- 198 to a ‘‘harmonious society.’’ Education, in this narrative, is a means to reform. Perhaps most postmodern about their change is that it happens through narrative , through the stories they share. Ms. Ward’s Introduction is both frustrating and enlightening. She tries to include too much: a short biography of Sarah Fielding (and all the complicated and painful family conflicts that her mercurial father initiated), a précis of Fielding’s publications, an interpretation of The Governess, a commentary on eighteenth-century educational reform. The edition’s appendices are equally wide-ranging: excerpts from reviews of The Governess, from Fielding’s correspondence , from her defense of Clarissa , and from Locke and other writers on education. Lost in all this is any sense of how or why Fielding could be such an experimental and eclectic writer. Early on, Ms. Ward refers to Michael McKeon’s account of the English novel as an amalgam, as a genre that originates in the dialectic between Fielding’s brother Henry and her friend Richardson. She does not pursue that insight and thus fails to establish an illuminating context for The Governess. This story about...