Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction 1789–1815 by Christie Margrave

Abstract

 Reviews express their feelings about their personal lives and marriages. As McIlvanney points out, ‘the radicalness of providing women readers with the opportunity to construct their own intimate subjectivities textually for the first time should not be underestimated’ (p. ). Ultimately, the dichotomy of private and public spheres breaks down in the liminal space of these journals, which offered readers a gendered community and raised awareness of women’s civic contributions to French society. B C M R-DF Writing the Landscape: Exposing Nature in French Women’s Fiction –. By C M. Cambridge: Legenda. .  pp. £. ISBN – –––. Recovering the works of women writers from the past and incorporating them into an established field of scholarship happens in stages. It begins with the crucial excavation work that leads to the publication of modern editions of texts, thereby increasing their accessibility. Next comes a period in which synthesizing overviews appear, introducing these new names, their lives and texts to wider audiences. In the final stage scholars build on these foundations to produce thematic studies. e publication of Christie Margrave’s first monograph Writing the Landscape is a welcome sign that the study of early nineteenth-century women’s writing in France is entering into this last phase. e book explores how women writers in Revolutionary and Imperial France employed the landscape as a means of selfexpression , as a metaphorical ‘landscape of one’s own’, to quote the highly apt title of the Introduction. e book is meticulously researched and packed with critical responses from a variety of different fields, showing Margrave’s interdisciplinary intentions. Her corpus of set texts includes novels by five authors—Sophie Cottin, Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Barbara von Krüdener, Adélaïde de Souza, and Germaine de Staël—whose rising stocks among dix-huitièmistes and dix-neuviémistes still remain far below their earlier history as best-sellers. e Introduction offers an extensive contextual overview of how nature became an increasingly present social and literary preoccupation throughout the eighteenth century. Here, Margrave advances the argument that, while the traditional relationship between women and nature has oen been thought of as one of containment, the liminality of natural landscapes in fact afforded significant freedom of expression to the authors in her corpus. e focus of each chapter is concentrated on different landscapes of both the emotional (love, loss, rebellion, autonomy) and the literary geographical (Ossianic) varieties, which shows the pliability of nature as a conduit for these writers’ ideas. e book’s strength lies in the highly fruitful and perceptive close readings that Margrave draws out across her source material. In particular, the intertextual references and connections to biblical stories and myths that she mentions are pertinent for showing the extent to which these women writers claimed the natural world as their own by adapting or pushing against existing literature. Margrave ends her study by restating her challenge to perceptions that the early nineteenth century in France was a period of literary dearth and reaffirming the need to understand that MLR, .,   its women writers were subject to—and perhaps continue to be subject to—different critical criteria from those applied to their male counterparts. is book opens the door for yet more focused work to be carried out on this understudied yet highly formative period in French literary and social history. B--T S A Victor Hugo. By B S. (Critical Lives) London: Reaktion. .  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Biographies of Hugo tend to be vast tomes. Graham Robb’s Victor Hugo (London : Picador, )—the last landmark biography in English—weighs in at  pages, while in France readers are eagerly awaiting the third instalment of JeanMarc Hovasse’s biography, whose first two volumes are roughly  pages each (Paris: Fayard, , ). In contrast Bradley Stephens has penned an elegant and succinct biography for the Reaktion Critical Lives series. e difficulties of confining Hugo’s life to two hundred pages are indicated by the sobriquet ‘Ocean Man’, an image that structures Stephens’s approach to writing Hugo’s life. As he points out: ‘e image of vast and endless fluidity evokes Hugo’s mind working like the rhythms of the...