Women Writers and the Nation’s Past 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories by Mary Spongberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Writers and the Nation’s Past 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories by Mary Spongberg Arianne Chernock (bio) Mary Spongberg. Women Writers and the Nation’s Past 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Pp. 248. $114.00. In her landmark Britons (1992), Linda Colley demonstrated how Britishness emerged as an oppositional identity. In the wake of the union of England and Scotland in 1707, Britons defined themselves against “others,” especially the French and Catholics. To be British, Colley contended, was to reject Paris and embrace Protestantism. This form of thinking continues today, as shown in the recent debate over Brexit, with Brexiteers seizing on the deep-seated distrust of outsiders to build support for Britain’s exit from the European Union. If xenophobia characterizes a strand of thinking about British nationhood, however, it has never been the only one. Just as Brexit divided Britons, so too there were different ways of understanding Britishness in earlier centuries. This is the concern at the heart of Mary Spongberg’s Women Writers and the Nation’s Past 1790–1860: Empathetic Histories. Focusing on a handful of female historians active during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Lucy Aikin, Elizabeth Benger, Agnes Strickland, and Mary Anne Everett Green—Spongberg demonstrates that their understandings of British history were remarkably protean and outward-looking. Over seven chapters, framed by a thoughtful Introduction and Conclusion, Spongberg shows that they treated the French, and foreigners more generally, with considerable empathy (a key word in Spongberg’s study). As Spongberg explains, “both before the French Revolution and in its aftermath, women writers (and their readers) resisted antipathy towards France, and the commitment to robust Protestantism (and powerful anti-Catholicism), that Linda Colley has asserted generated the powerful new entity of Britain” (12). That Spongberg adopts this ambitious frame is one of the many merits of her study. While the book is ostensibly an attempt to recover women’s [End Page 382] historical writing during the late Hanoverian and Victorian periods, Spongberg makes clear throughout that recovering their stories also requires a rethinking of British history and identity. The two cannot be separated, as Spongberg quickly learned when she embarked upon the project. “When I began this book,” she reflects, “I thought of it as a set of case studies of women historians in the nineteenth century.” Yet, she continues, paying attention to these women has also illuminated new approaches to the writing of history during this period. Their histories, she explains, in striking contrast to those then available, were histories “sympathetic to Catholics and to France, histories told from the peripheries, histories that were pro-Stuart and histories that did not regard English history as ‘exceptional’ but rather as intimately connected with the Continent” (155). It turns out that Spongberg’s female subjects wrote history in a different voice. Whereas many of their male peers “promoted the idea of long-term enmity to France, women writers and their readers resisted the patriarchal and nationalist parameters which constrained both British and French history, and in so doing generated cosmopolitan communities catalyzed by empathy rather than nation” (33). The question, then, is why? Why these different ways of narrating the past? And why such a stark division along gendered lines? For Spongberg, Edmund Burke is key to answering these questions, though his contribution is complex. On the one hand, Spongberg writes, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) inaugurated history as a “masculinist discipline” (1). In explaining why Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 deserved praise while France’s Revolution of 1789 was to be denigrated, Burke lionized those Whig statesmen who had rescued Britain from its “effeminate” Stuart past. This was a narrowly defined version of history, centered on male heroics. On the other hand, however, Burke assigned Marie-Antoinette an important role in his account, even if a largely passive one. Burke’s objections to the French Revolution turned on Jacobins’ unchivalrous treatment of their queen. (The British, Burke implied, were far more courteous toward women, especially women of rank.) In this respect, gender and emotion were central to his narrative. “By representing the trauma of the revolution...