MLR, I02.2, 2007 489 theirauthors were friends,or at leastpart of the circlewhich revolved aroundWilliam Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft inLondon in themid- I7gos. Each novel was re ceived as a roman-a-clef, Amelia Alderson describing Godwin andWollstonecraft's idealistic attempts to forge a relationship based on rationality,not convention, and Mary Hays fictionalizing the story of her unrequited love for William Frend, another member of their radical clique. However, afterher friend Wollstonecraft died, Amelia Alderson drifted away from this coterie,marrying thepainter JohnOpie and only thenbeginning towrite fiction. Her second novel, Adeline Mowbray, has usually been regarded as an anti-Jacobin work, critical of the radicals' idealism and offering a bleak assessment ofwhat hap pens when their theory isput intopractice. Read in thisway, her novel offersa strong contrast with the unabashed social radicalism ofMemoirs of Emma Courtney, the storyof an independent woman boldly following her own intellectual and sexual de sires.But asMiriam Wallace explains inher admirably concise introduction,Adeline Mowbray can also be read as a social critique, particularly of the long-established or thodoxies constraining women's lives.After all, thenovel can seem as unenthusiastic about marriage and a life lived according to the dictates of female propriety as it is about Wollstonecraftian experimentation. As a result, some recent critics-though not all-have detected hints of subversion, and ironieswhich belie the tale's osten sibly conservative moral. Wallace herself takes a balanced view, but admits thatpart of her purpose inpresenting Adeline Mowbray togetherwith Hays's more manifestly radical text is todemonstrate the fragilityof the radical/conservative dichotomy. It is thepolitical ambiguities of these novels thatmake them so fascinating to teach, but they are not an easy read for today's undergraduates. The novels were deliber ately written as part of a debate, and to appreciate their complexities, a significant knowledge of their context is necessary. To supplement the introduction,Wallace has provided fifteen text boxes, interpolated into the texts, each addressing a con textual theme ('Female Sexuality and Desire' or 'Abolition Literature'). These are nicely succinct but stillmanage to be well informed and thought-provoking; they add significant value to the edition, as do the contemporary reviews and the hand ful of illustrations. A two-for-one edition like thismight seem somewhat coercive, depriving lecturers of the chance to choose their own set texts (a strong argument could be made for teaching Emma Courtney with Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, for example, which directly parodies it:both are newly pub lished byBroadview Press). But the extras probably compensate. It is regrettable that the subtitle ofAdeline Mowbray is given incorrectly (TheMother and Daughter, not The Mother and theDaughter), and it is a pity that this edition is available only in theUnited States, but this is still awelcome resource foranyone teaching a course on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's writing. NEWCASTLEUNIVERSITY MATTHEW GRENBY Shelley and Vitality. By SHARONRuSTON. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. Xiii+299pp. ?45. ISBN 978-I-4039-i824-6. Sharon Ruston's account of Shelley's engagement with theburgeoning contemporary debate about the nature of lifecontributes valuably both to the ongoing recovery of the historical registers of Shelley's work and to our understanding of theGordian relationship between science and literature in the 'Romantic' period. Simultaneously unearthing a controversy long neglected by literaryhistorians and adding new detail toShelley's biography, Ruston establishes beyond doubt that thevitality debate pro vided Shelley with a powerful vocabulary forexpressing his ideas about imaginative and political processes, and the relationship between them. 490 Reviews Ruston's firstchapter describes the origins of the vitality debate in eighteenth century natural philosophy, summarizing contributions by, among others, Priestley, Thelwall, Darwin, and Adam Walker, Shelley's scientificmentor at Syon House and Eton. These useful summaries build towards amore focused discussion of the increasingly vitriolic controversy between the twoBart's surgeons, JohnAbernethy andWilliam Lawrence, in I8I4-20. Abernethy, professedly adapting theunpublished work of JohnHunter, argued that life resulted from an unknown principle, super added to the physical matter of living bodies; against this, thematerialist Lawrence, Abernethy's erstwhile protege at Bart's, argued that lifewas simply an effectof the particular organization ofmatter in livingbodies. What emerges clearly fromRuston's account here is...
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Jan 31, 2018
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