Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1730–1850 by Devoney Looser

Abstract

536 Reviews Leibniz's calculating machine and Swift's Lagadian text-generating machine, while Sarah Kareem focuses on the sometime mineralogist, fabulist, and treasure-hunter Rudolph Raspe. Finally, Larry Stewart writes on attempts to quantify power dur ing the Industrial Revolution, culminating in James Watt's establishment of horse power as an arbitrary but necessary measurement. The strongest essay of the last section sees Carole Fabricant debunk the imper ial triumphalism of voyage literature by showing that,when not read through a perspective of Eurocentric national and technological superiority, these 'narratives tell a number of different,often conflicting stories?of defeat, humiliation, and vul nerability (p. 320). Fabricant demonstrates that James Cook's and Mungo Park's travelogues have an often overlooked Gulliverian, mock-heroic quality, wherein the European is frequently well out of his depth. Like all the best essays in the collection, Fabricant's contribution shows tensions between ideals and realities, planning and execution. Collectively, the book portrays the period as a delicate balance between dynamic forces of change, resistance to that change, and widely varying ability to implement change, individually and institutionally. Though the essays range in quality, the standard is consistently high. Keele University Nicholas Seager Women Writers and Old Age inGreat Britain, 1750-1850. By Devoney Looser. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2008. xvi+234 pp. ?29. ISBN 978-0-8018-8705-5. In Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 Devoney Looser purports to investigate what she calls Titerary historical gerontography', a neolo gism of her own coining which might appear at first sight confusing, although in fact ?it suggests thatwriting about lives with a focus on advanced age is a compensatory gesture, following what has so often been a slight to that life stage in traditional literary?and even feminist literary?biography' (p. xii). That is to say, Looser chooses towrite about the late and very late production of women writers straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, regardless of the age of the characters that appear in their lateworks; indeed they are not all novelists and theworks under consideration are not necessarily works of fiction.What the author is trying to do is to extricate, out of themass of data on thewomen writers considered which she has assembled and correctly supplies to the reader, a pattern of theway contemporaries would judge old women when writing. The troublewith this aim is that she does not appear to be able to identify a pattern deriving from this search: we are therefore to follow her in her presentation of case studies and draw single conclusions from them. She remarks that for contemporaries 'Old age was presented as a woman's source of shame' (p. 4), old women being accused of querulousness and garrulousness, although at the same time 'Agedwisdom, though more readily tied tomen than to women, could adhere to old age' (p. 15). The only general conclusion to be drawn, it would appear, is that agism or proto-agism [. . .]played a role in the neglect ofmany women authors in their late lives', thus MLR, 105.2, 2010 537 impairing literary historical periodization' (pp. 168-69). It is a fact that literary history is habitually organized by authors' birth dates, whereas itwould look ra dically different iforganized by authors' death dates' (p. 169).To give an example: JaneAusten (1775-1817) andWalter Scott (1771-1832) would come before Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) and Fanny Burney (1752-1840). In pursuit of her purpose, after a very richly textured introduction, Looser dedi cates a chapter to Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, and then single chapters to Catharine Macauley, to JaneAusten, to Hester Lynch Piozzi, to Anna Letitia Barbauld, and to JanePorter: all of them, except JaneAusten, lived to considerable and even advanced old age (between sixty-one and eighty-eight), which brings the reader towonder in the firstplace why a chapter should be dedicated toAusten, who lived only to be forty-two: in this case Looser definitely turns her interest to narrative characters, and precisely to old maids, whose peculiar plight, however, is contained within quite loose age-brackets, not necessarily definable as belonging to old age'. This uncertainty of a theoretical scheme does not mean...