The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750 ed. by Ros Ballaster

Abstract

Reviewed by: The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750 ed. by Ros Ballaster Isobel Grundy The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750, ed. Ros Ballaster. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pp. xxvi + 282. $67. The first question about a volume designed to cover sixty years in the history [End Page 151] of women’s writing must be how to arrange or structure it. These years, after the ebbing of seventeenth-century sectarian debates and before the high tide of the new novel, saw a flourishing of female playwrights on the London stage, a crescendo of proto-feminist debate, unusual variety and versatility in both fiction and poetry, and much more. It takes in the writing careers of Finch, Astell, Pope, Montagu, and most of Haywood. How can such a multiplicity of stories be ordered or told? This volume in the Palgrave Macmillan History of British Women’s Writing largely eschews storytelling as such. Each contributor considers a topic, under which each was invited to address the careers of two or more authors and not to shy away from judgments on texts. The topics come in groups (mostly) of three: three kinds of debate (on women, on luxury, on urban versus rural values), three kinds of transformation, four writing modes (with Kathryn R. King on “Scribal and Print Publication” preceding essays on drama, periodicals, and scholarly enquiry), three kinds of love-relationship (religious, erotic, and friendly). Ms. Ballaster provides an introduction and closing critical overview. The result might be called a mosaic composed of small-sized tesserae, but the picture built up is far livelier, offering views and glimpses of a complex subject that changes according to the viewpoint taken. Disadvantages of this method are that no text or issue or oeuvre is considered in very great depth, that chronology has little purchase as a mode of understanding (though a useful chronology preceding the essays does some of this work), and that some small components of the whole may escape notice. If any aspect of women’s writing gets short shrift, it is probably life-writing: no mention is made of the diaries of Celia Fiennes, Elizabeth Freke, Sarah or Mary Cowper, Elizabeth Wast, or Elizabeth Cairns. If any individual author gets less than her due it is Mary Pix; Jane Spencer quotes other critics finding her inadequate as a proto-feminist, but her virtues go unmentioned. Advantages of the method include interesting juxtapositions, the revealing of unexpected relationships, a letting-in of light from unusual angles: altogether a thought-provoking volume, mostly resistant to the orthodoxies into which the history of women’s writing is in danger of settling now that it is no longer largely unknown. Contributors have, of course, approached their brief very differently. Some (like Karen O’Brien opening the volume with an essay on the debate around women’s place, and Kathryn King writing in a pivotal position on manuscript and print) have dealt with the rich array of authors available by touching to good effect on far more than three. These two essays and others in the volume are history at its best, drawing effortlessly on a wide field to create a single complicated picture. Each is relevant to almost every feature of women’s writing during this period. Some authors benefit from reappearing in different lights and different surroundings, like Finch (in contexts of the city and the country, the Scriblerians, and friendship: Moyra Haslett judges her friendship poems the most interesting and inventive in the Wellesley manuscript), Haywood (in contexts of the luxury debate, the novel, periodicals, the erotic, and friendship), and Montagu (city and country, the Scriblerians, periodicals). Astell appears not only in the context of women’s place but also in those of luxury and of friendship. Jane Shaw considers her, in relation to religion, alongside writers whose views she would have deplored: Jane Lead, Anne Dutton, and M. Marsin. [End Page 152] Some male writers too, notably Pope and Richardson, register their importance by frequent appearance. On the other hand, it is pleasing to see discussion of some seldom-broached names, like Dutton, Marsin, Mary Chandler, and Mary Mollineux. Several essays include useful surveys...