Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 ed. by George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker

Abstract

81 ally there’’ to the tautological assertion that lesbian literary history should be understood ‘‘in conjunction with history.’’ The final two eighteenth-century essays of the volume, both concerned with the specifics of writing eighteenthcentury literary histories of women, draw respectively on the completed ongoing projects of their authors: Antonia Forster and James Raven’s, English Novels, 1770–1829 (2000) and Susan Staves’s Longman’s History of Women’s Writing. Ms. Forster describes how her amassing of bibliographical information from searches of contemporaryadvertisements and reviews gives a fullersenseofwomen novelists’ careers than was previously possible through the ESTC. Ms. Staves’s ‘‘Terminus a Quo, Terminus ad Quem: Chronological Boundaries in a Literary History’’respondsdirectlytothedeclared aims of the volume’s Introduction with her rigorous theoretical grounding of literary history as a distinct genre. From the summary historiography of predecessor works, she concludes that chronology offers the most useful organizing principle for such an exercise. While the terms of her inquiry have been set by theLongman series’ designated subject of women’s writing, and she is consequently released from the need to question closely this categorical restriction, she nevertheless demonstrates as convincingly as the other contributors to the volume, the advantages of feminists’ readings that are ‘‘less narcissistically obsessed with the sufferings of women and more broadly intellectually engaged with significant literary and political debates of the day.’’ As with the essays contributed by Ms. Schellenberg, Ms. Hobby, and Ms. King, the turn here from apologetics or exceptionalismtodetailed contextual explorations of women ’s writing advances both the refiguring of feminist criticism and, more largely, of literary history as a workable category of inquiry. April London University of Ottawa Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England , 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker. Cambridge: Cambridge , 2002. $60. In his Introduction to this elegant volume of essays, Mr. Justice draws our attention to the parallels between the early modern period in which manuscript publication existed alongside emergent print technologies and our own world in which print practices share cultural space with emergent technologies of digitalization and internet publication. Acknowledging and building on the foundational work of scholars like Margaret Ezell (who also has an essay in this volume), Messrs. Justice and Tinker and the volume’s contributors ‘‘argue for a broader conception of the practice of authorship’’ than that commonly understood in a print-centered literary history. In order fully to understand the ways in which information is, was, or will be distributed and assimilated , we must ‘‘look at manuscript culture as a persisting set of procedures with its own history and customs as well as balancing manuscript and print as unfinished , in-process cultures with strong cross-fertilization.’’ These essays challenge the opinion that early women writers resorted to scribal rather than print publication out of modesty or fear for their reputations. Manuscript circulation had its own set of rules and its own advantages, such as the greater control of circulation and audience , and freedom to engage intellectu- 82 ally with controversial matters aired to a select and discriminating readership of like-minded people. In fact, some of the essays, like Isobel Grundy’s, consider manuscript publication as an avenue for creative expression. The young Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Ms. Grundy argues , participated in a coterie manuscript culture in pursuit of ‘‘mental independence and imaginative self-realization.’’ Leigh Eicke and Margaret Ezell are interested in the way women writers allude to or reveal the practices of manuscript publication in their printed works. Ms. Ezell argues that posthumous print publications can be examined for the purpose of ‘‘reconstructing and reanimating a long-deceased literary landscape’’ that included a vibrant manuscript culture, while Ms. Eicke discusses the way Jane Barker’snovels ‘‘bothcelebrateandresist the world of print’’by paying equal homage to the worlds of scribal and print publication . Collectively, the essays deepen and broaden our sense of women’s options , rather than restrictions, as to how, why, and to whom to write. To read this volume, essay by essay, is to come across signposts pointing in directions for future commentary. In ‘‘Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Tactical Use ofPrint and Manuscript,’’ Kathryn King writes, ‘‘one of the most insistent...