The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Betty A. Schellenberg

Abstract

57 fidence of a Davies or Trapnel, transcending class divides? What can the shift from mother of a daughter (Davies) to daughter of a mother (Trapnel) to mother of a sect (Fell) show us? Certainly anachronistic discourses illuminate ; we are made of them. Yet that the women themselves might have had a point of view never crosses Ms. Feroli ’s mind. There is also a curious animus to real female power: ‘‘Of course, Anne’s monarchical power was far less than that of James.’’ Fell’s claim that women first witnessed the resurrection is ‘‘overstated and extravagant.’’ Instead of recognizing an insurgent and undeniable claim, regularly erased by a patriarchal tradition, Ms. Feroli disputes the necessity of female witness to the progress of Christianity. After all, ‘‘according to all four gospel writers, Christ appears before all of his apostles shortly after his resurrection.’’ Ms. Feroli seems unaware that the earliest gospel, Mark, indeed ends with the women, afraid. The resurrection appearance in Mark was added later by the tradition that Davies , Trapnel, and Fell were successfully resisting and adapting. It is all rather strange; would it were more interesting. Regina Janes Skidmore College BETTY A. SCHELLENBERG. The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2005. Pp. x ⫹ 250. $85. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist literary critics and cultural historians advanced the thesis that the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a separate-spheres gender system. This thesis, argued by Nancy Armstrong, Janet Todd, Jane Spencer, and others, stresses the predominance in the eighteenth century of a new model of sexual difference, one that identified women with the virtues of the home and granted them the dubious honor of representing, collectively, society’s moral barometer. Revisiting the grounds on which the domestic thesis was built, critics recently have constructed very different historical edifices. In The Gentleman’s Daughter (1997), Amanda Vickery argued that ‘‘the increased harping on the proper female sphere might just as easily demonstrate a concern that more women were seen to be active outside the home rather than proof that they were so confined .’’ New modes of urban life afforded women greater, rather than less, freedom in the public sphere, Vickery suggests , and stringent codes of propriety served as the means by which men and women alike proved their gentility and social authority. Ms. Schellenberg, like Vickery, challenges an earlier generation of feminist orthodoxy in her study of mideighteenth -century British women writers whose authorship was shaped as much by geographical location, modes of publication, professional connections, and patronage networks as it was by gender. Claiming that previous histories of women writers—particularly those of mid-eighteenth century authors—have simplified a complex narrative, Ms. Schellenberg’s rigorous analysis of each author’s works displaces gender as ‘‘the prior explanatory cause overriding all other causal factors.’’ She reads Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph alongside John Home’s Douglas to stress their mutual investment in the ideals of disinterested virtue and heroism, an investment connected to the political ideologies associated with Lord Bute and the court of George III. Frances Brooke appears as a political phi- 58 losopher who maintained a consistent and outspoken commitment to ‘‘feminist Country ideology.’’ Sarah Scott assumed the title ‘‘author’’ as ‘‘a merely occasional label’’ and dreamed of transcending ‘‘barriers of gender, geography, genre and status.’’ Ms. Schellenberg’s comparison of the different modes of selffashioning (Sarah Fielding as a ‘‘person of letters’’ and Charlotte Lennox as a ‘‘professional writer’’) provides us with an understanding of ‘‘the interdependent double faces of the modern author.’’ A chapter that compares eighteenthcentury evaluations of less well-known, but also prolific, novel writers—the Minifie sisters and Edward Kimber— argues that the period’s standards of aesthetic value were applied universally , without regard to the author’s gender. The book’s final chapters use Frances Burney as their starting point for a study of the ‘‘strategic naming and forgetting’’ undertaken by women writing literary history in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Ms. Schellenberg’s excellent overview of the mid-century print marketplace questions any simple notion of gender as the primary determinant in a woman author’s career...