Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827 (review)

Abstract

396 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:4 of Berglund's book as the symbol of eighteenth-century female wish-fulfilment, does not constitute Austen's final word on the subject. Perhaps the largest problem with this work is its historical arbitrariness and cultural vacuity. The introductory survey of the position of middle-class women at the end of the eighteenth century certainly explains the interest of these writers in the social and psychological dimensions of domestic space, but it does not account for (or even recognize) a much longer, larger cultural interest. It is as if house imagery bloomed suddenly among these three women writers in response to new or sharply felt social conditions. The houserepresents -owner (or-ought-to) theme, of course, goes back through Palladio to Vitruvius, and its literary history is rich: elaborately treated in the works of Roman poets, revived in England with the country-house poems of Jonson, Donne, and Marvel, re-idealized by Pope, Fielding, Smollett, and Byron, and surfacing in many less obvious works from Defoe 's A Journal of the Plague Year to Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall, the image of the house has been a standard fixture of English literature. Berglund's rather mechanical dichotomy between male and female experiences of confined space (for men "there is never any doubt ... that confinement is bad and liberty good. ...[PJersecution ... comes from outside their family circle," pp. 16, 102) pays no attention to the literary works of Defoe (and only briefly mentions Richardson), or to the critical work, among others, of W.B. Camochan and John Bender. Although Berglund cites Mark Girouard's indispensable Life in the English Country House, she makes no comparable use of his rich historical background to contextualize the apparently dramatic debuts of her chosen authors . Woman's Whole Existence follows the boundaries of gendered literary space; it does not push them. Cynthia Wall University of Virginia Gary Kelly. Women, Writing, and Revolution: 1790-1827. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ? + 328pp. £35.00. ISBN 0-19-812272-1. The political importance of women's writing, and particularly women's fiction, in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is now well established. Among the critics who have contributed over the past twenty years or so to our developing understanding of this literature, Marilyn Butler, Mary Poovey, Terry Lovell, Nancy Armstrong, Claudia Johnson, Janet Todd, and Patricia Meyer Spacks spring immediately to mind. So does Gary Kelly. Alongside the work of these female and feminist commentators, Gary Kelly's studies of fiction in the Revolutionary period—The English Jacobin Novel (1976) and English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (1989)—scrupulously map the interventions made by novels in political debate and ideological struggle. In doing so, they inevitably engage with the importance of women's writing; and in Kelly's recent book on Mary WoUstonecraft , Revolutionary Feminism (1992), and now in Women, Writing, and Revolution, that focus on the revolutionary role of women has become explicit. In the preface to Women, Writing, and Revolution Kelly presents his method of "historical enquiry" as having "much to offer" both to "women's literary studies" and to "Uterary and cultural studies in general" (p. vi). And he enlists strong feminist support for this unexceptionable position, quoting both Rita Felski and Laurie Finke on the importance of investigating the particular meanings of gender and feminism within specific cultural and REVIEWS 397 socio-economic formations. Thereafter, KeUy confines his engagement with current feminist analyses to footnote references and concentrates on offering the results of his own "historical enquiry." His study is divided into two equal sections: "Women and Writing in the Revolutionary Decade" focuses on the 1790s; "Women, Writing, and the Revolutionary Aftermath" deals with the remaining thirty years of his chosen period. Both sections follow exactly the same pattern: a lucid and densely documented overview of the gendered politics of writing in the period is foUowed by chapters on the careers of three individual women—Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton. Through these case-studies of women who, in very different ways, "challenged discursive , generic, and stylistic orders that subordinated women and their writing" (p. vi...