Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Tanya M. Caldwell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Tanya M. Caldwell Mark Fulk Tanya M. Caldwell, ed., Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 250; 2 b/w illus., 1 table. $34.95 paper, $120.00 cloth. Tanya M. Caldwell's edited collection of essays focuses on life-writing in the circles of Samuel Johnson and Frances Burney. The six essays and Caldwell's introduction reach beyond the long eighteenth century to model vital practices for the reading of life-writing in a myriad of forms, including letters (original and edited/republished collections), journals, and family memoirs alongside the more traditional categories of biography and autobiography. One of the strengths of Caldwell's collection overall is its tracing of critical strategies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to the life writings of Johnson, Burney, and their circles. These essays also provide insight into the significance of works at the margins of the literary and the ways we can incorporate them into our discussions of how various texts shape the interpretation of the lives and the canons that comprise our scholarly and pedagogical concerns. Lisa Berglund's essay on Hester Lynch Piozzi's Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1788) opens Caldwell's volume by examining the ways that Piozzi's editing shapes the publication of Johnson's letters in a way that offers an apologia for Piozzi's second marriage to a younger man, the Italian musician Gabriel Mario Piozzi. Berglund shows how Piozzi's ordering of Johnson's letters, like her other editorial practices (including some but not all of Piozzi's own letters to Johnson), "deliberately construct … from 'found' epistolary materials" the arguments that tell her story in a way that supports her second marriage (27). Berglund explores the reception history of Piozzi's work to highlight the way Piozzi's reconstruction of Johnson (and, indirectly, of herself) is still contested even today. Peter Sabor's continued writing on Alexander D'Arblay, the only son of Frances Burney D'Arblay and the Duke D'Arblay, offers in tandem with his earlier article "Creative and Uncreative Gloom: Frances Burney and Alexander D'Arblay" a fuller picture of a young man who would develop mental illness in later life than has previously been available.1 The essay Caldwell includes is valuable for its insights into the impacts of parental favoritism on child-rearing as well as the situation of an only son in the age of the French Revolution and Romanticism. Describing Alexander's childhood and years at Cambridge as a student and as a fellow, Sabor's essay traces with subtle and arduous detail Frances Burney's views of and concerns about her favorite and only child. Although Sabor determines that "Alexander clearly suffered from depression" even though it remains "difficult to [End Page 508] determine the source of his ill" or assess his parents' "responsibility" for them, Sabor's essay offers valuable insight into these tumultuous times and the case of one, perhaps average, young man of two rather exceptional parents (69). Marilyn Francus's article considers how the family biographies written by Frances Burney (of her father Charles Burney) and Alicia LeFanu (of the Sheridan family) play with the promise of private, secret information. Francus delivers a rich context for the epistemological questions that family biography even today exploits, arguing that these questions concerning methodology and reader expectation shape the ways that family biography is written and consumed. Francus provides the publication history, contexts, and receptions of these biographies, showing how Burney and LeFanu are writing against prevailing notions as well as other unauthorized biographies of their subjects. Through this combining of methodologies, Francus demonstrates that the reading of family biographies and their constructions of privacy create a vexing context for our own reading, ultimately raising profound questions about "knowledge, truth, accuracy, and authorial agenda" that go to the heart of how we read life-writing in this period as well as our own (101). Victoria Warren's detailed treatment of Isabelle de Charrière demonstrates the importance of the inclusion of this remarkable writer in the canon. Normally only considered in...