The Great Remembering

Reviewed by: Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market Maria Frawley Linda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. xv + 289, $35 cloth. Anyone who teaches Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or George Eliot knows that discussion of anonymous or pseudonymous authorship is an inevitable (but rarely simple) way to help students begin to navigate the waters of nineteenth-century women’s writing. There are not one, but many, reasons why Austen’s first novel was published “by a lady,” or why Charlotte Brontë ventured into print as Currer Bell, or why Mary Ann Cross (aka Marian Evans) adopted the pseudonym George Eliot at a particular point in her career. Discussing “Male Pseudonyms and Female Authorship in Victorian England,” Catherine Judd long ago noted that “The discrepancy between the historical record of women writers’ publication trends in the nineteenth century and modern perceptions of those patterns indicates the existence of a cluster of mythic images surrounding the Victorian woman writer—especially the domestic novelist” (251). Judd’s piece was written for Literature in the Marketplace, the landmark collection edited by John Jordan and Robert Patten (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Linda Peterson’s Becoming a Woman of Letters, with its emphasis on the complexities of the literary marketplace and the emerging profession of authorship, belongs to this lineage and is indebted to many other valuable works of scholarship on women writers and print culture in the period as well. But it stands alone in grappling forcefully with the ways “a cluster of mythic images” were propagated—and often deliberately cultivated—by women writers in ways that worked with the “facts” of the market and in ways that were at least as “enabling” as they were “disabling” (10). [End Page 198] Peterson establishes one of her most significant premises early on, when she notes an intention to challenge the “historical arc of ‘rise and fall’” (3). If a “vastly expanded commercial press” made entry into authorship possible for a wide array of writers, male and female, women authors negotiated the passage differently and with varying degrees of success. The case-study approach that Peterson adopts works well to accentuate the individuality of the stories, while pairings between each two chapters become illuminating studies of contrast. After introductory chapters on the idea of a “profession of letters,” these chapters assess the sometimes widely discrepant histories of Harriet Martineau, Mary Howitt, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Riddell, Alice Meynell, and Mary Cholmondeley. Peterson inaugurates her study by putting periodicals at center stage: the emergence of new periodicals early in the century, many quickly garnering a reputation for cultural importance, offered the potential for a writer to be self-supporting. But if periodical publication provided a relatively new option for remuneration, the idea of the professional author was also relatively new. Peterson studies the “Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters” published in Fraser’s Magazine in the 1830s to undercut easy assumptions that male writers eagerly embraced the status of the professional author, or that women writers were prohibited from doing so. While portraits of male and female authors in Fraser’s underscore the importance of public personae at the early stages of professionalism and augur the celebrity journalism predominant later in the century, they also highlight anxieties and uncertainties, especially with respect to domestic roles and social status. Periodicals function in this introductory chapter, as they do throughout the book, not just as the vehicle through which entry into authorship may have been made possible, but also as a site for debates about the terms of authorship, and the differences between commercial and literary value. Crucially, though, periodical writing throughout this study is seen to function interactively with other genres, modes, and venues, as well as with institutions, such as the Society of Authors, or historical moments, such as the campaigns for copyright. Relatively early on in the study, Peterson concludes, “whether we use the language of the nineteenth century men of letters or of modern literary sociologists, the fact remains that the category of authorship was highly contested and the meaning of professionalism contested also...

828 Reviews filtered through a chronic splitting headache, amovement away from the rational theology of her intimate friend, Henry More, towards Quaker beliefs in mystical transformations effected by inward light. Conway's attempts to deal with her pain resulted in a final understanding that converts chronic pain from mere sensation to a transformative perception of the redemptive power of Christ. 'The Consumption ofMeat in an Age ofMaterialism' by George Rousseau focuses on the proudly meat-eating English. Its most stirring and vivid images result from the absence of effective dentistry, capturing a long eighteenth century of decaying mouths rancid with cavities and distorted by wooden teeth. The last two essays explore the workings of imagination and scientific scepticism. Peter Fosl's 'Cracks in the Cement of the Universe' studies Hume's use of the associ ation of ideas to counteract scepticism, and James G. Buickerood's 'Empiricism with and without Observation' examines thought experiments inNewton and Locke. These essays draw upon early modern science to reveal a variety of fascinating and unusual subjects that draw us to perceive the period in new ways. This review does very rough justice to varieties of unique perceptions occasioned by the focus on science. UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH KENNETH W. GRAHAM Mary Wollstonecraft:A Literary Life. By CAROLINEFRANKLIN. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. XiX+240pp. C50. ISBN 0-333-9725I-I. In line with the aims of the publisher's Literary Lives series, this study is at its strongest when analysing the intellectual and social context within which Mary Woll stonecraft operated. Therefore, the readings ofWollstonecraft's works, although com petent in tracing major themes, are at their most illuminating when most contextual. In particular, Caroline Franklin's positioning of other women writers for children in terms of their religious and political views sheds interesting light onWollstonecraft's own educational projects, while remarks made on Blake's work and reaction toWoll stonecraft's writing for children are suggestive. Here comprehensive footnotes pro vide direction for further study. The book is also informative on works that have often in the past received less critical attention, notably on theHistory andMoral View of theOrigins and Progress of the French Revolution, which Franklin sites in relation to the work of other contemporary commentators, e.g. Helen Maria Williams. Her dis cussion of the work in terms of developments in Wollstonecraft's own thought is also revealing. Wollstonecraft's complicated relationship with Imlay is treated sensitively and valuable contextual information concerning the composition of the resultant Let tersWritten during a Short Residence in Sweden ismade more accessible. Similarly, Franklin provides useful contextual information on The Wrongs ofWoman; or, Maria, exploring both Godwin's interpretation ofWollstonecraft's incomplete text and the contemporary debate on divorce. Franklin's study is informative onWollstonecraft's divided attitude toprint culture. It demonstrates her belief that participation in the public sphere of print would aid general enlightenment and social progress. However, it does not ignore her fears and those of her like-minded contemporaries of the dangerous power of such print culture when in authoritarian hands or when received by ill-informed and impressionable readers. Franklin in fact gives an interesting perspective on the publishing circle around Joseph Johnson and on the broader debate concerning the political role of print. As such, the study's nuanced account of the publishing scene will operate as an antidote to anyone inclined tomake crass generalizations about the position of women writers during the period. MLR, I0I.3, 2oo6 829 Indeed, in this light, Franklin's concluding remarks on the effect of the new empha sis on context upon our reading ofWollstonecraft are also significant. Having recog nized Wollstonecraft's continuing influence upon generations of feminists, Franklin makes the point that, given this new contextual understanding, Wollstonecraft is 'less recognisably our contemporary': 'This eighteenth-century woman has an agenda so distinctly of its time-born out of religious as well as of political convictions-that we need scare quotes to call her a "feminist" at all' (p. 2IO). Yet Wollstonecraft's own 'tradition of feminism' is, as Franklin says, 'saturated in the word, in literacy and literature, in a participation in print culture and a concern with representation...

Reviewed by: Des femmes en littérature Anne Hajek Reid, Martine . Des femmes en littérature. Paris: Bélin, 2010. Pp. 331. ISBN: 9782701155661. In Des femmes en littérature, Martine Reid seeks to contribute to our scholarly understanding of the gendered nature of literature written by women in France. She reminds us that French women have been both writing and publishing since the Middle Ages. Their existence as producers of literature is not in question. In fact, Reid points to a large body of scholarly work devoted to the study of French women's writing. Nonetheless, she cautions that women's place in overarching descriptions of literary history and in collective memory is still problematic: regardless of the large numbers of texts they produced, relatively few women writers are typically represented today in university curricula or in scholarly reflections on literature. Reid explains this absence by hypothesizing a systematic erasure of women's literary contributions. She argues that during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, male critics capitalized on widely-accepted ideas of gender to marginalize progressively and eventually erase the works of women authors from literary history. Reid adopts a two-fold corrective approach to re-thinking women's place in the literary historical record. She first explores the reception of women authors after the Revolution and then analyzes a variety of post-revolutionary women's novels. Throughout the text, she convincingly argues that women's writing is always "singulière;" each text should be approached as a unique literary creation, not reductively categorized under a monolithic label. The first part of her book, "Discours," aims to sketch a history of the reception of post-revolutionary women authors and to highlight the obstacles facing them as they embarked upon literary careers. In her first chapter, "Défenses et illustrations," Constance Pipelet, Germaine de Staël, and Félicité de Genlis serve as examples of the various ways in which women writers defended their own involvement in literary pursuits given the social constraints of gender. In chapter two, "Bas-bleus," Reid turns her attention to pictorial representations of women writers in the nineteenth century. She examines criticism of the bas-bleu in the illustrations of Jules Janin, Frédéric Soulié, and Honoré Daumier. For her, these images represent commonly held perceptions of women writers as a threat to social order because of their perceived transgression or rejection of socially accepted gender roles, especially those of wife and mother. By creating laughable images of women authors, caricaturists took the first step in what Reid views as a process aimed at erasing women's literary contributions. The third chapter, "À Titre d'hommage," examines works by Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine to illustrate further the nineteenth century's growing hostility toward women's literary involvement. At the end of part one, Reid turns to the field of literary history, to demonstrate definitively the existence of a slow process aimed at expunging women writers from the French literary record. She shows how, by the end of the nineteenth century, [End Page 329] women writers had been successfully relegated to the margins of literary history. For Reid, the effects of the process are felt even today: although a significant number of Anglophone and Francophone scholars have excavated and explored many forgotten works, women authors have been only weakly integrated into the broad scope of literary history and have yet to occupy their true place. In the second half of her book, "Fictions," Reid turns to literary texts, primarily novels, to illustrate the ways in which gender affected women's literary production. By using gender as a critical lens, Reid hopes to begin the process of fully integrating women's writing into the literary historical record. Before beginning her in-depth textual analyses, she explores the implications of publication for women. Then, she examines and questions the common association of women with the novel, suggesting that persistent association of women with the genre was yet another effort to keep women on the margins of literature. In chapters seven through twelve, Reid carefully analyzes novels of varying lengths by a diverse selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers. Her goal is to reveal the extreme...

This edited volume of fifteen essays on the subject of “transatlantic women” signals an ongoing and welcome set of developments in the still relatively new field of transatlantic studies. It adds to the field in two significant ways, both by helping to define the field's theoretical parameters and by contributing important examples of how transatlanticism can be productively applied to new areas of study in the future. On the whole, the strength of this volume resides in the particular essays as stand-alone examples of the places the field might go, and not as much in the volume's theoretical armature, though careful thought has gone into considering how to draw connections among the fifteen diverse essays.As Brigitte Bailey, one of the three editors of the volume, points out in her useful introductory essay, the field of transatlantic studies has come into its own over the past two decades. Bailey highlights two of the founding texts in this field: Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and Paul Giles's Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imagination (2002). Bailey contends that these works, among others from this early period of the formation of the field, “question the national frameworks of literary scholarship and make a compelling case for reading nineteenth-century literature in the international contexts in which it was written, contexts that include empire, capitalism, the slave trade, migration, cultural hybridity, international print culture, and the comparative elaboration of national imaginaries” (xiv). The field of transatlantic studies has continued to mature over the past two decades, giving rise to international conferences, an anthology, journals, and numerous specialized monographs and collected volumes. (For a review of four of the most recent scholarly monographs in transatlantic studies, see Joseph Rezek, “What We Need from Transatlantic Studies,” American Literary History 26.4 [2014]: 791–803. Web. For another recent account of the state of the field, see Jennifer Phegley, “The Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press and the Emergence of Transatlantic Studies,” American Periodicals 25.1 [2015]: 62–67. Web.)So what is unique about this particular collection of essays among the many recent contributions to the field? Why women writers? Why Great Britain? Why the nineteenth century? Most important, why these specific limiting factors all at once? Are these factors, taken together, simply a convenient way of narrowing down a topic to a suitable length for an academic book, or is there some logical coherence that emerges from this synthesis? According to Bailey, this book fills a gap since there has been no other “volume that pulls together research on a range of nineteenth-century American women writers working in multiple genres as figures engaged in the transatlantic world” (xv). Indeed, this volume casts an especially wide net in terms of time period, covering the whole nineteenth century, and disciplinary approaches (though most of the essayists are from English departments, there is a real variety in subfields). If the field were new and still in the process of being defined, the broad sweep of its subjects could be taken as a shortcoming, but, in fact, as the essays line up, the strength of this volume is its “diversity of approaches” (xvi). Rather than occupying themselves with a debate about the relevance of transatlanticism as a theoretical approach to literary texts, Bailey, her coeditors Beth L. Lueck and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, and the contributors to this volume seldom concern themselves with justification of the method. However, there remains a question of boundaries (women writers, American, engaged with the idea of Great Britain, nineteenth century). For example, Bailey's illuminating chapter on Margaret Fuller's New-York Tribune dispatches ends with a fascinating coda about Fuller's visit to Lyon, but then seems to shut down abruptly, leaving us wanting to know about Fuller's writings from France and Italy, which are unfortunately outside the purview of this volume. The opposite question might also be worth considering: why is this collection not more narrowly focused? A few of the most interesting essays look at the decade before and after Margaret Fuller's record-setting steamship voyage from Boston to Liverpool in 1846, clearly a moment of historical change worth a more concerted look as a nodal point for transatlantic studies.One could easily imagine a volume more rigorously organized around a particular constellation of ideas as well. The book is divided into two collections of essays: the first is called “Tourism, Celebrity, and Reform: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Transatlantic Travel,” which includes essays about Frances Osgood, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Harriet Jacobs, and Ellen Craft, all in the antebellum period, and many of them in some way exploring racial identity and abolitionism. The final essay in this first section stands out as an anomaly in terms of period and subject covered. It is about the Women's Rest Tour Association, founded in Boston in 1891, and the way it encouraged and constructed European travel for a broad range of American women starting in the 1890s. Nonetheless, for the most part, the first section has a coherent focus: the relationship between public and private identities and how transatlantic American women writers in the nineteenth century managed these identities in historically specific ways. Damon-Bach's essay about Catherine Maria Sedgwick's 1839 tour of England and the book she wrote about it, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841), summarizes one of the more important contributions of Transatlantic Women: “The transatlantic conversation for women writers is, in part, about the relationship between a woman's home life and her authority to write” (43). This same constellation of issues is also elaborated in Sarah Klotz's essay about Frances Osgood (“A Flight from Home: Negotiations of Gender and Nationality in Frances Osgood's Early Career”); this chapter centers on a close reading of Osgood's book of poetry, A Wreath of Flowers from New England (1838). Bailey's essay on Margaret Fuller (“Margaret Fuller's New York Tribune Dispatches from Great Britain: Modern Geography and the Print Culture of Reform”) most fully develops this historically particular range of identity positions, in this case as adopted by Fuller at the moment when she becomes a “transatlantic foreign correspondent” (49). Bailey writes of Fuller's work as a correspondent: “I would like to suggest ways of reading these texts more analytically by following the lead of Fuller's frequent conjunctions of the geography and the print culture of British modernity” (51).The second section, “Authorship, Influence, and Reception: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Transatlantic Print Culture,” seems less focused and more of a catchall than the first. It includes chapters on two significant transatlantic literary correspondences (between Stowe and George Eliot and between Sarah Orne Jewett and Mrs. Humphry Ward). Both of these chapters contribute significantly to our understanding of all four of these writers and how they reacted to the changes brought on by a globalizing print culture. Particularly of interest is the discussion of the ways the passage of the American Copyright Bill in 1891 affected Ward's sense of herself as a transatlantic author (Silvey 281). This also connects to Sharon Estes's chapter on Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World (1850) as an “English bestseller” and its implication in legal shifts in copyright law in 1851–54 (214). Estes describes the transatlantic nature of Warner's best seller in terms of both its audience (it was a huge seller on both sides of the Atlantic) and its message (it illustrates “the potential for the creation of transatlantic reading audiences that self-consciously saw religious reading as going beyond nationality” [209]). However, as a whole, the second section is less coherent than the first. Chapters on the influence of geological thinking on Emily Dickinson or the influence of Milton's Comus or Brontë's Jane Eyre on American writers seem less sharply engaged with the principle concerns of transatlantic studies. They are, in fact, more along the lines of pre-transatlantic influence studies.Taken together, as a single work of scholarship, this volume's most important contribution may be that it serves as a corrective to the long-standing practice of reading certain forms of nineteenth-century women's writing as nonliterary or marginal forms. In her chapter on Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Damon-Bach counters Mary Suzanne Schriber's argument in her groundbreaking work Writing Home: American Women Abroad, 1830–1920 (1997): “According to Schriber, only by the end of the century did women's travel writing evolve into ‘high art,’ as in the works of Edith Wharton” (41). Transatlantic Women refocuses our attention on the literariness, in all its richness and complexity, of the writers in the century before Wharton, and in so doing recasts our understanding of Wharton's prehistory. From the point of view of transatlantic studies, Wharton's prehistory is something different from that posited in Schriber's timeline (a timeline reflective of a pre-transatlantic scholarly moment); from within transatlantic studies, as it is delineated in Transatlantic Women, we can see Wharton's work within a continuum rather than as a break with the past.

Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

Reviewed by: Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance by Elizabeth Hodgson Marion Wynne-Davies GRIEF AND WOMEN WRITERS IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE, by Elizabeth Hodgson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 196 pp. $90.00 cloth; $72.00 ebook. In the summer of 1616, Lady Anne Clifford wrote in her diary of how she had received “news of my Mother’s death, which I held as the greatest & most lamentable Cross that could have befallen me” (p. 28). Although these words appear to describe in simple terms the title of Elizabeth Hodgson’s Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance, the book uncovers a much more complex understanding of how Renaissance women wrote about grief. Indeed, Clifford’s words are a good example of this complexity since, while she certainly grieved the “lamentable” loss because her mother was much-loved, she also would have regretted the loss because of the support her mother could have provided in Clifford’s tortuous battle to claim her inheritance. Clifford’s grief, therefore, was personal and political, emotional and economic. Such multiple and divided patterns of grieving are deftly uncovered by Hodgson as she examines the “complex connection between the dead and the living who mourn them” (p. 2). These models of lamentation are carefully located within their historical context so that both the crucial shift from Catholic to Protestant mourning rituals and the varied social and medical discourses of the period are delineated. However, the real strength of this book lies in its close reading of works by four women writers: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Aemelia Lanyer; Mary Wroth; and Katherine Philips. Chapter one explores the “nexus of mourning and inheritance” in the poetry of Pembroke (p. 2). Unsurprisingly, Hodgson focuses upon those works that mourn the death of Pembroke’s brother, Philip Sidney: “The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda” (1595), “Even Now That Care” (1599), and “To The Angell Spirit” (1599). Beginning with a description of Sidney’s funeral, Hodgson argues convincingly that Pembroke constructed her poetic lamentation not only to express intimate grief but also to lay claim to her brother’s poetic inheritance: “Pembroke is thus depending heavily on the inheritance-rights of the mourner, as politically and socially experienced in her own aristocratic world, to explain and enable her literary work” (p. 47). This alliance between personal and public gestures of grief [End Page 267] is sustained by Hodgson in chapter two, through her analysis of Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611; Hail, God, King of the Jews). Lanyer was from a different social milieu than Pembroke so rather than focus upon a noble inheritance that could never be hers, Lanyer invokes the discourse of patronage and “hopes to be rewarded by the human saints to whom she prays in her mini-epic” (p. 50). Intriguingly, Hodgson identifies a link between Lanyer and Pembroke, in which Lanyer asserts that the aristocratic poetic inheritance of Pembroke imbues Pembroke with a “peculiar power as a writer” so that the noble discourse is allowed to filter through to middleclass poets (p. 60). In some ways, chapter three’s focus upon Wroth’s prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) and her sonnets from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) would appear to follow seamlessly from the personalized grief of her aunt, Pembroke, and the awareness of aristocratic lamentation discourses employed by Lanyer. Nevertheless, Hodgson identifies a crucial difference in Wroth’s writing: the poetry and prose is not so much about representing the experience of grief but rather about how those emotions may be translated into literary forms. Supremely aware of the power of the sonnet, Wroth evokes a “melancholic voice that is more extremely mournful than the usual Petrarchan frustration,” which finds its sole embodiment in the “testament of verse” (p. 99). In chapter four, Hodgson jumps almost fifty years to the politicized mourning poetry of Philips’s Poems: 1667 (1667). In this collection Philips includes intensely personal works, such as “Orinda Upon Little Hector Philips,” alongside political polemics, such as “Upon the Double Murther of King Charles.” Hodgson deftly interweaves these two seemingly disparate discourses, showing how Philips gives “a domestic gloss to her...

Reviewed by: Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing David Greven Beam, Dorri . 2010. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press. $89.00 hc. $71.00 e-book. 270 pp. Correction: The print version of this review contained a typographical error in the first sentence. At the request of the publisher, the online article and pdf have been corrected. Dorri Beam's Style, Gender, and Fantasy is a bracing study of écriture feminine in nineteenth-century American writing. What makes Beam's book valuable is her rigorous and passionate exploration of a specifically feminine poetics in the period. Disabusing the reader of any staid notions of what constitutes literary value, Beam makes a persuasive case for a legitimate female literary style that emphasizes what she calls "highly wrought" language and imagery. Often dismissed as flowery and frilly, this style, through Beam's insightful and tough-minded presentation, comes into its own as a highly self-conscious mode of literary art-making and self-expression. Beam's work significantly adds to our understanding of what was at stake for the nineteenth-century woman writer on multiple levels—and not least, her claim to aesthetic legitimacy to begin with. The standards of taste and decorum relegated even popular women writers (and women were by far the more popular writers of the era) to the sidelines. Beam restores the importance of female writing in the century to contemporary literary studies, but crucially he does this by taking women's writing seriously as an aesthetic project. In so doing, she also illuminates what was generally at stake for this century's literature in aesthetic terms. Regarding the latter, Beam's work expands the emergent scholarly interest in literary style in the period. Indeed, many prominent male writers of the period have often been accused of being prolix or florid—Edgar Allan Poe comes to mind. While the entire question of nineteenth-century literary style will now be reexamined in light of Beam's project, her focus will have its most salutary effect in our sustained reappraisal of significant figures such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Prescott Spofford, among others, artists whose challenging work has often been simultaneously dismissed and misunderstood, especially in aesthetic terms. Writers such as Spofford have been ignored or undervalued until very recently because they offer no "proposal[s] for practical change, . . . no alternative to the cult of feminine beauty" they foreground (134). Yet Beam demonstrates persuasively that Spofford "mines [End Page 165] the possibilities of gorgeous or ornamental style for a woman writer, perversely developing its potential as a feminist aesthetic" (134). Personally, I find Beam's appreciation for Spofford's perversity as bracing as her elucidation of what Spofford—a languorously, sensually weird writer—does with the word. For Beam, nineteenth-century women's writing is characterized by a "stylistic floridity" that invites a "trance-like entrance" into a literary world in which "fruits flush, waters brim and cascade, color pulses, and light saturates"; the "personified elements of nature—sun, rocks, and flowers—take on lives of their own and speak to alternative sensual ways of being in the world that marriage will imperil" (2). Surprisingly, Beam makes no mention of the great French feminist Hélène Cixous's dynamic and controversial theory of l'écriture féminine, literally "women's writing." Regardless of how Beam might view Cixous's work, it would have been interesting and also helpful to see her engage with the theorist's ideas. In any event, Cixous's ideas take on a new force for me if I link them to the historical context Beam provides. "Language that was transparent, that did not grant immediate access to the text or to the author," Beam writes, "was inappropriate for a woman writer"; language that evinced "labor" disrupted limited notions of female propriety. Writing with a flourish, an accentuated personality, further disrupted these standards by flaunting style, a "dubious accessory" (4). The highly, almost disorientingly stylized language and imagery of writers like Spofford—so routinely dismissed or ignored for precisely these reasons—take on a new purposefulness here. What has seemed like...

Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism

Reviewed by: Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly," by Cathryn Halverson Miranda Hickman FARAWAY WOMEN AND THE "ATLANTIC MONTHLY,", by Cathryn Halverson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. 272 pp. $90.00 hardback; $27.95 paperback; $21.99 ebook. Halverson's book, Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly," offers a vivid overview of the work and adventures of four western women writers, all of whom enjoyed what they saw as the good fortune of publishing their life-writing—developed from correspondences and diaries—in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly under the editorship of Ellery Sedgwick, during his long tenure (1908–1938). Halverson's featured writers are Elinore Pruitt Stewart and Hilda Rose, who wrote of homesteading in Wyoming, Idaho, and Alberta; Juanita Harrison, whose My Great, Wide, Beautiful World (1936) follows her travels around the world; and Opal Whiteley, whose diary, supposedly capturing her youth as a child prodigy, was reconstructed by Sedgwick into The Story of Opal (1920). These women contributed to the magazine as newcomers to the profession of writing; appearing in the Atlantic Monthly (publishing in which even acclaimed writers such as Mark Twain and Henry James sought as a plume) brought them new cultural status as bestsellers. Sedgwick sought out such "faraway women," as he called them, to bring to the Atlantic Monthly readership the experiences, expressed in "authentic" prose, of women in parts of the United States remote from the magazine's base in the northeast (p. 39). Sedgwick's [End Page 171] decision to feature the life-writing of many such women writers formed part of his strategy for boosting circulation and re-creating the Atlantic Monthly; he was known for shifting the publication's former emphasis on "literature with a big 'L'" (Sedgwick's phrase), preferred by predecessors such as Bliss Perry, to greater accent on "human interest" and "journalistic" directions (pp. 2, 19). Halverson's richly researched, subtly drawn account brings out the allure such writing held for Atlantic Monthly readers. Halverson herself favors the "faraway" designation since it evokes not only the geographical but also the cultural and socioeconomic distance between these writers and their readers, endowing their narratives with glamour, shaping their style, and conditioning the cultural work achieved by their writing. Their accounts conjured what it was like to pioneer new ground either as homesteader (Stuart and Rose) or traveler and adventurer (Whiteley and Harrison), living beyond received ideas about women's lives. Audiences often felt so connected to such long-distance writers that when Rose wrote of her need for economic assistance in northern Alberta, readers actually sent her provisions and money. Halverson's two previous books—Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West (2004) and Playing House in the American West: Western Women's Life Narrative (2013)—likewise brought new serious critical attention to such western women writers, and here she deepens this engagement. Her introduction elegantly articulates the book's contributions. Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly" affords critical revisions of these writers, and it offers the first study focused on early twentieth-century working-class women writers of the American West. Its broader ambition is to provide a "new optic" on western writing by "remapping," "through a sequence of microhistories, the coordinates of American literature," challenging "binary assumptions about East and West, national and regional, cosmopolitan and local, gender and power" (pp. 9, 3). It is also the first study devoted to this era in the evolution of the publication now known as The Atlantic. The book's theoretical framework is constructed from textual scholarship, research on women's partnerships, studies in print culture, and periodical studies. Invoking Jerome McGann, Halverson limns the "textual condition" of these narratives, restoring them to their original periodical context to illuminate their genesis, reception, and impact (p. 10). Her portrait thus features not only these women's writing but also the sociomaterial conditions and collaborative processes generating their work, as well as highlighting both Sedgwick and the powerful cultural phenomenon of the Atlantic Monthly. Tracing the influence of the Atlantic Monthly requires spotlighting Sedgwick himself. Sedgwick's work as editor was crucial to the "making" of these women writers, often right down to the details of preparing their [End...

Early theorists of online networks likened the ideals underpinning emerging cyber-communities to Jürgen Habermas's conception of the bourgeois public sphere. This association is evoked by the online Jane Austen community, <em>The Republic of Pemberley</em>, which elaborates its enthusiasm for Austen's oeuvre within the Habermasian rhetoric of eighteenth-century Bluestocking feminism. In its celebration of female sociability and textual production,<em> The Republic of Pemberley</em> recalls the female-centred social and intellectual circles that formed in eighteenth-century Britain around Bluestocking hostesses including Elizabeth Vesey, Frances Boscawen and Elizabeth Montagu. This essay explores the extent to which the theoretically democratic spaces of the Bluestocking salon were constituted by rigorous class and sexual standards, these strictures masking the extent to which Bluestocking sociability and scholarship transgressed the gendered and sexual norms of late-eighteenth-century Britain. Pemberley and the eighteenth-century public sphere are moreover linked by an analogous tension between their democratic ideals and their actual social instantiation, each employing rigorous social regulation to quell the embodied and affective energies constitutive of their alternative polities.

Rostek, Joanna. <i>Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age: Towards a Transdisciplinary Herstory of Economic Thought</i>

Recent scholarship on the role emotion and sympathy played in the Enlightenment’s mapping of historical progress invites a reconsideration of the women writers who are the subject of this book: Mary Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries, including first- and second-generation Bluestockings and gothic and historical novelists, who are often placed outside a feminist literary tradition because of their endorsement of the feminine and refined emotions she critiques in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The mid-eighteenth-century explosion of literary, philosophical, and historical narratives that theorized what Scottish Enlightenment philosophers called “the progress of the female sex” not only made gender central to understandings of the civilizing process, but was also shaped by the work of these writers. A Feminine Enlightenment places this argument in conversation with recent work by J.G.A. Pocock and others on multiple Enlightenments, literary scholars on the Scottish Enlightenment, and feminist critics on women writers’ responses to Enlightenment.

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1097 major Scottish poets of the earlier twentieth century, Sydney Goodsir Smith's 1952 collection Robert Fergusson 1750-1774: Essays by Various Hands (London: Nelson) remains indispensable. However, since 'Heaven-Taught Fergusson' is the only booksized essay collection since then, it is a valuable attempt to reintroduce Fergusson to our contemporaries. General assessments of eighteenth-century literature need to include him more centrally. Moreover, the book is worth having just for the informa? tion Janet Sorenson provides about the word 'wow' (p. 117). University of Glasgow Alan Riach Romanticism, Maternity, and theBody Politic. By Julie Kipp. (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xiii + 237pp. ?40; $60. ISBN 0-521-81455-3. This study explores a range of representations of maternity in the Romantic period, representations linked by their engagement with a paradox which, according to Kipp, lies at the heart ofRomantic-era motherhood, whereby mothers were encouraged both to follow their affectionate 'natures' and to subordinate their affections to the best interests of the child and the state. Thus, she suggests, maternity was structured as an almost untenable subject-position: mothers were 'dangerously good' ifthey loved their children indiscriminately yet 'naturally bad' if they did not love them enough. The boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' motherhood threatened to dissolve under the pressure of a doubly contradictory construction of motherhood: not only must the ideal mother identify closely with her child and also promote his or her develop? ment as an autonomous subject; she must negotiate too her own confinement to the domestic sphere and a compromised civic identity No wonder that mothers might become too closely involved with their children to act objectively and that maternal love might become 'a savage impulse'. As Kipp demonstrates, many post-Enlightenment literarytexts invoke the motherchild bond, earlier utilized by Kant, Rousseau, and Hume as a figure forwider social relations, as a means of naturalizing or critiquing other forms of social interaction. The figureof the Irish wet-nurse in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui is a telling example. As Kipp demonstrates, Ellinor's divided position as both natural and foster mother en? ables Edgeworth to explore the conflicted subjectivity of the Irish people, dependent politically and economically on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy (of which Edgeworth was herself a part). Moreover, Ellinor's indiscriminate feeding of her natural and foster child, and her success in substituting one for the other, suggest the fragilityand permeability of the boundaries between the Irish and Anglo-Irish peoples. Similarly, in The Heart of Midlothian the representation of distracted or infanticidal mothers allows Scott to explore the dangerous nature of passionate local (Scottish) attachments , which threatened the stability of what was, in his view, the progressive and enlightened Act of Union. This suggestive study also explores images of motherhood in the novels of Matthew Lewis and Mary Wollstonecraft and in the poetry of Charlotte Smith and Percy Shelley. Yet the question which it does not quite ask or answer is why maternity was figured in such strikingly ambivalent terms in the literature of the period. In this re? spect Kipp's study might have benefited from closer attention to the socio-economic and medical contexts of motherhood in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. This was a period of significant change in class structure and in patterns of inheritance. A powerful middle class favoured more equitable systems of inheri? tance than the landed gentry,but was equally anxious to make absolute distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children. In recognizing only church marriages, 1098 Reviews Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753 not only firmed up the concept of legi? timacy but tied it more closely to the middle classes. Informal betrothal customs lost much of their coercive power, illegitimacy rates rose among the poor, and con? cerns about infanticide and abortion led to the criminalizing of abortion in 1803. Reproduction, like production, was thus increasingly regulated by the nation state, with sanctions against 'improper' motherhood increasing the risks of maternity. The rise of obstetric medicine created additional pressures. In order to account for the physiological changes which took place in pregnancy, influential accoucheurs such as Thomas Denman developed existing...

This article explores the role of urban epiphanies in four novels by postwar Spanish and Catalan women writers. At certain key moments in these narratives, particular urban locations play a transformative role in the female characters' self-development. It is argued here that these descriptions of mental states provide valuable insights into the impact of urban space on female identity. The urban epiphanies created by these women writers challenge, albeit temporarily, the patriarchal culture and ideology of the Franco regime which attempted to fix women's place within the domestic sphere. All of the texts illustrate how these women writers represented the urban environment as a place in which their protagonists can find psychological freedom and briefly experience a fluid, non-gendered self.

Reviewed by: Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Sara Crosby Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. xxi, 308 pp. Index. $29.95. The title Women in Print is cleverly ambiguous. That indeterminate "in" immediately hinges the book on a question about which particular feminist approach the essays in this collection take. Does "women in print" address how male-dominated texts construct women, that is, women as objects of print? Or does the phrase refer to how women shape their own texts and textual communities, that is, women as subjects of print? Most works of feminist literary scholarship have concentrated on answering either one or the other of these questions, taking either a "critique" or "recovery" tack. The integration of print culture studies with feminist methodology, however, has encouraged an illuminating combination of both approaches. Print culture studies—because of its attention to the multi-sided interplay of readership, textual production, and authorship—affords a concrete way to track the construction of culture as a many-sided conversation and so promises to reveal a nuanced "big picture" of both gender and textuality. In her foreword, Elizabeth Long implies that Women in Print participates in the reconstruction of this broader conversation—arguing that the "interdisciplinary traditions" of feminism and print culture studies allow the volume to achieve an integrative "breadth and unity rare among edited collections" (xv). And so it does, but the "breadth" is perhaps less balanced than the foreword suggests: While many of the essays gesture toward the first "critical" meaning of "women in print," they are justifiably most interested in what women had to say and so lean heavily toward the second "recovery" approach. They contend that, when seeking to evaluate the roles women played in print, women-owned/authored/distributed print culture provides sources of "superior credibility" (85) to male-dominated outlets and, furthermore, that women found the clearest avenue to "promote female agency" (17) and "mak[e] [women's] voices heard" (222) through these woman-controlled venues. As Long points out, the volume as a whole examines this "female agency" from a number of different disciplinary angles, and its chapters are authored by well-established scholars in [End Page 132] the fields of English, women's studies, American studies, history, sociology, anthropology, and library and information studies. Nevertheless, in spite of their divergent methodologies, these writers all ground their essays firmly in detailed biographical scholarship, aimed at unearthing some of the women editors, publishers, catalogers, librarians, and booksellers who influenced American print culture from the 1870s to Oprah. While this common foundation helps connect its parts, Women in Print primarily gains the "unity" Long identifies by subordinating a concentrated biographical focus to an overall organization that emphasizes the broader intervention these women made in print culture. The book sorts its eleven essays into an introduction and three sections grouped according to its subject's species of contribution: For instance, the first section focuses on women editors and publishers and how their "syncretism" (65) worked to create a space for disenfranchised voices in the dominant culture. The suffragette Clara Bewick Colby, the Harper's editor Elizabeth Jordan, the American Indian activist Marie Potts, and the radical librarian Celeste West, all sought to create textual communities for their audiences by bridging the gap between feminist goals and the hegemonic ideologies and material circumstances that shaped their readers' experiences. The second section examines the more subtle work of female librarians, catalogers, and antiquarian booksellers. These women used their influence over the organization of the Library of Congress catalog or the distribution of rural libraries to support women's access to print culture. This part, in particular, starts to uncover the often overlooked ways in which women's roles as cultural custodians or "middle men" have profoundly impacted print culture. The third section, by contrast, turns its attention to a more familiar feminist concept. It examines how women used print to facilitate "gendered agency," that is, their direct social and political activism...