The Social Life of Criticism: Gender, Critical Writing, and the Politics of Belonging by Kimberly J. Stern (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Social Life of Criticism: Gender, Critical Writing, and the Politics of Belonging by Kimberly J. Stern Marysa Demoor (bio) The Social Life of Criticism: Gender, Critical Writing, and the Politics of Belonging, by Kimberly J. Stern; pp. viii + 240. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016, $70.00. Kimberly J. Stern’s starting premise in The Social Life of Criticism: Gender, Critical Writing, and the Politics of Belonging is that gathering societies like clubs and coffee houses actually found their discursive avatar in the periodical: “criticism was consistently and explicitly presented as a collective enterprise” (3). Most of the extant reminiscences and studies of the phenomenon deal with men’s clubs, assuredly its best known format. Past research of these networks, like Morton Cohen’s, also focused on the club connections between men of letters, such as the meetings of journalists, editors, and publishers at the Savile Club. In recent years, several studies have uncovered the importance of networks of women writers too. Stern’s book continues that research while acknowledging a number of other key works. The word “Gender” in the subtitle therefore really means women since the male journalists are moved to the margin or are referenced by their invisible “good practices” (97). Admittedly, I was somewhat disappointed not to see my own work, Their Fair Share: Women, Power and Criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870–1920 (2000), among her sources, especially since it deals to some extent with Vernon Lee’s contributions to the weekly. More importantly, perhaps, Stern does not use Fionnuala Dillane’s brilliant study of George Eliot’s entanglement with and contribution to the Westminster Review (1824–1914) (Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press [2013]). That said, there is no doubt that Stern’s book significantly adds to our understanding by taking her analysis into new directions. Hers is also an inclusive study, starting with mid-eighteenth-century culture and ending with an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s take on criticism and with Stern’s observations on women’s criticism now. [End Page 642] At the very start, however, Stern declares her main claim to be that “nineteenth-century female critical consciousness depended implicitly upon a social and at times even sociological understanding of the profession” (3). One of her interesting bypaths, therefore, involves the activities of women writers as society hostesses, famous for their salons and able to draw in a mix of the intellectual elite of the day and thus stimulate an evolving critical thinking. Nowhere is the link between clubs and periodicals more explicit than in the periodicals directly emerging from the bourgeoning club life, such as the little-known and short-lived periodical Echoes from the Clubs (1867–68). Although this only covered men’s clubs it also contains proof of the changing times. The June 1867 issue published a letter by a woman reader with the pseudonym Oneida that starts by imploring the editor: “Pray Sir, why should we poor women be debarred from the luxuries of club life?” She continues by describing what she means by Ladies’ clubs and invites the editor of Echoes over to her house to discuss the matter. The letter ends humorously by asking the editor to come after 5:00 p.m. because her husband will have then left for his club; if he should still be there, she asks not to broach the subject: “for men are so selfish, that, like the rest of his sex, he would do all he could to prevent us poor women from obtaining the smallest increase of freedom” (“Ladies’ Clubs,” Echoes from the Clubs 4 [1867], 61). That letter confirms one of Stern’s points, that the wall between the public and the private spheres was not as impermeable as Jürgen Habermas presented it to be. She positions herself in a line of feminist critics who have criticized that theoretical stance, holding that there is a difference between historical fact and representation of history. Stern starts her exploration of the intertwinement of coffee houses and periodicals in the eighteenth century, when it reached its acme. This is where she finds her first case...