Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period by Andrew McInnes, and: The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811 by Deborah Weiss

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period by Andrew McInnes, and: The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811 by Deborah Weiss Anne Chandler WOLLSTONECRAFT'S GHOST: THE FATE OF THE FEMALE PHILOSOPHER IN THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, by Andrew McInnes. London: Routledge, 2017. 198 pp. $155.00 cloth; $52.16 ebook. THE FEMALE PHILOSOPHER AND HER AFTERLIVES: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, THE BRITISH NOVEL, AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF FEMINISM, 1796-1811, by Deborah Weiss. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 291 pp. $119.99 cloth; $119.99 paper; $89.00 ebook. Though methodologically different, Andrew McInnes's Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period and Deborah Weiss's The Female Philosopher and Her Afterlives: Mary Wollstonecraft, the British Novel, and the Transformations of Feminism, 1796-1811 share the assertion that Mary Wollstonecraft, through her authorial personae and the posthumous remembrances of her husband William Godwin, acquired the status of an archetype that underwent revision in the fiction of other feminist writers. McInnes and Weiss each see "the female philosopher" as a conceit enabling successors to endorse aspects of Wollstonecraft's social critique while distancing themselves (and their novelistic heroines) from the taint of bohemianism Godwin inadvertently fostered following Wollstonecraft's death. Both authors find that women novelists of the Romantic period—Mary Hays, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and others—took care to distinguish between dangerous and safe forms of feminist philosophy and to re-shape Wollstonecraftian feminism into a gradualist, politically liberal enterprise. Whereas McInnes sees the trope as allowing subversive revisionings of feminism under the cover of separate-spheres ideology, Weiss emphasizes the gradual subsumption of Wollstonecraftian radicalism by that ideology, as later novelists assessed what women could realistically do within the still-protective framework of marriage. The two studies' tight focus on "the female philosopher" leitmotif is sometimes limiting. The coinage derives from recent scholarship rather than from direct usage by Wollstonecraft or her contemporaries. In spotlighting "the female philosopher" as a metonym for cultural anxiety about Wollstonecraftian feminism, McInnes and Weiss seek to provide a unified through line on a set of writers whose politics are difficult to classify. In both books, though, the term is in constant need of qualification, and one sometimes sees a gap between the metacritical and characterological levels of its application in chapters. McInnes begins Wollstonecraft's Ghost by historicizing the trope in two phases, first through earlier eighteenth-century understandings of the French Enlightenment's femme philosophe and the British bluestocking (each subject to feminist and misogynist inflections), and then through [End Page 161] 1790s debates over the French Revolution, whose early objectives Wollstonecraft defended as beneficial to women. In the British anti-Jacobin backlash of the middle 1790s, McInnes argues, "female philosophy" became aligned in simpler ways with Franco-and gynophobia. Always "a rhetorical figure" expressing ideological tension, "the female philosopher" now signified women who should be kept out of public life for their own and others' good (pp. 6, 11). Observing that any Romantic-era response to Wollstonecraft was affected by these phases of public discourse, McInnes describes "a Habermasian double bind" for early feminists: whereas the "literary public sphere" was open to them, the political one was off-limits despite a widespread belief that the two were contiguous in British culture (pp. 14-16). Inasmuch as Wollstonecraft attacked both "stereotypical representations of the female reader in literature" and "the related divisions between public and private spheres," later novelists were able to reference her "on a metatextual level" in modeling for their own readers what women's intellectualism should look like (p. 16). This case is best made in McInnes's first chapter, "Imagining Mary: Representations of Wollstonecraft in the Works of Mary Hays and William Godwin." Hays was a protégée of both Wollstonecraft and Godwin, so McInnes uses correspondence and incidental writings toward critical readings of Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1798) and St. Leon (1799). The dynamics between autobiography and political fiction in the novels are...