WSG Reviews – Page 5 – Women's Studies Group 1558

Review: The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. By Anna Mercer. New York and London: Routledge. 2019. Pp. 210. £115.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780367277956.

The relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is fascinating to many, both scholars and the general public, but it has been subject to many myths and misunderstandings – some of which were simply bias. The customary misogyny of Victorian and Edwardian – and later – scholars assumed that Mary Shelley could not have written her books without the help of her husband and she met with plenty of criticism for her editing of Shelley’s poems, although we would have far fewer of them were it not for her work. Since the rise of feminist scholarship, it is often assumed that Percy Bysshe Shelley ‘interfered’ with Frankenstein, and his remarks about her writing are sometimes interpreted as negative even though his admiration for her work and intelligence never faltered.

Anna Mercer is not dealing with the emotional side of the relationship between the couple. The relationship under discussion is a working, collaborative, literary one. Mercer shows how they continued to inspire each other, to share interests and ideas, to pass on subjects for composition, to read together and play literary games, no matter what other events were disrupting their writing careers. I am following Mercer’s practice in using their initials to identify each Shelley in order to avoid confusion.

In this study, Mercer has built on the work of the editors of the facsimile editions of the Shelleys’ mss such as the Garland editions of The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts and The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics. These editors frequently made the original discoveries of notes in the mss which indicate how the Shelleys commented upon, altered, or added to each other’s work but Mercer’s study has collected these and presents the information in a continuous story written in an engaging style, taking a chronological approach. This means we begin with PBS’s declaration in 1814: ‘Your thoughts alone can awaken mine to energy […] How divinely sweet a task it is to imitate each other’s excellencies – & each moment to become wiser’ (p. 1). PBS was to admire his wife’s writing and frequently encourage her to write (pp. 112, 145).

As Mercer remarks (p. 2), her ‘findings […] are representative of a specific attitude: the strength of the Shelleys’ individual works must be, in part, a testament to the stimulating environment created by a relationship shaped by literary pursuits’ (p. 2). Mercer defines collaboration as ‘creativity based on “united labour, co-operation”’ and ‘archival and intertextual study’ finds ‘evidence of their textual practices of reading, writing and copying’ (p. 3). Mercer is emphatic that ‘the assumption that MWS was simply a subordinate partner’ (p. 4) must be challenged. Her research shows that MWS ‘invariably informs [PBS’s] thinking and influences his writing’ and that ‘at certain episodes in their relationship they would generously share ideas and assist one another but not without identifying – or claiming – their distinctly personal voices’ (p. 7).

When the Shelleys eloped in 1814, ‘the spirit of collaboration blossomed between them as they toured Europe’ (p. 32). MWS began her journal, originally shared with PBS, which inspired their History of a Six Weeks Tour. They also worked on PBS’s unfinished novel The Assassins and were to work in a similar way together on Frankenstein which ‘benefited from PBS’s editing and […] evidences their collaborative and sometimes blended voices’ (Charles E. Robinson, quoted, p. 63). Mercer goes on to discuss this and the shared interest in PBS’s Laon and Cythna with its dedication to MWS. Meanwhile, PBS wrote other short poems to MWS and they read and studied together, MWS learning Latin. Later he translated the Symposium, citing the need for it for those who did not read Greek, like MWS (p. 180).

Mercer goes on to discuss the way in which MWS influenced PBS’s work on The Cenci. She mentions their evening play readings. In these the Shelleys read their way through almost the whole Beaumont and Fletcher canon and other Jacobean plays, and they were undoubtedly a great influence on both The Cenci and on PBS’s later, unfinished Charles the First. PBS originally thought MWS better able to execute this play, perhaps because of her skill and liking for historical research, but he also suggested The Cenci should be written by her. As she did not feel competent as a poet she refused to do it, although she admits that they ‘talked over the arrangement of the scenes together’ (p. 82). It was she who had translated the ms on which the play was based, and the story also inspired her novella, Mathilda. The shared interest in drama led to MWS writing two short plays, Proserpine and Midas, for both of which PBS provided some lovely lyrics.

Manuscript evidence from The Mask of Anarchy shows MWS, when copying, following PBS’s extremely complex alterations accurately, making suggestions, corrections and supplying missing words. As these were approved by him, it is clear that for the Shelleys this was a method of working which supported both of them and that the criticisms of their ‘interference’ in each other’s work is misguided. After PBS’s death, MWS continued a practice sanctioned by him in his lifetime.

Their collaboration is shown in other ways, such as the similarity in characters of the Maniac in Julian and Maddalo and Beatrice in MWS’s Valperga, references by PBS in the dedication to the ‘Lines Written among the Euganean Hills’ to not erasing lines ‘at the request of a dear friend’, his teasing dedication to The Witch of Atlas referring to their difference of opinion about whether his poetry was too ‘abstract’, and his completion of poems such as Rosalind and Helen because MWS encouraged him to do so. MWS actually contributed a line to The Letter to Maria Gisborne (p. 119), reminiscent of the way in which PBS wrote with his sister Elizabeth when they were teenagers.

The chapter on the editing of PBS’s posthumous work shows how it became for MWS both a source of comfort and pride as well as torment, and the way in which she was wounded by the undeserved and ill-intentioned criticism she received for, for example, omitting the dedication to PBS’s first wife, Harriet. It is pleasant that the book does not end with this painful episode, but with the way in which MWS engages with her memories of her husband and their life together, including locations and acquaintances, creatively using them as a source for her later novels and short stories. Although this might not be termed collaboration, it is fair to comment, as Mercer does, that PBS remained an inspiration and a voice in her work long after his death and the actual collaboration of their lifetime.

This book is a valuable contribution which sheds light on the work of both the Shelleys and how two writers can influence, inspire, critique and aid each other in composition. The on-going discussion about whether PBS’s work was too ‘abstract’ and without plot or story was no doubt stimulating to him both in encouraging him to write ‘personal interest’ stories like The Cenci and in reacting against it with The Witch of Atlas. His tremendous enthusiasm for MWS’s talent as a writer and a researcher was undoubtedly an inspiration to her not just in his lifetime but afterwards. Although they enjoyed only eight brief years together, Mercer has revealed the evidence for this inspirational relationship which should make us value the Shelleys the more.

Jacqueline Mulhallen

Author of The Theatre of Shelley (2010), Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poet and Revolutionary (2015), and the plays Sylvia and Rebels and Friends (touring November 2019: see performances)

Joanne Major and Sarah Murden, All Things Georgian: Tales from the Long Eighteenth Century

All Things Georgian: Tales from the Long Eighteenth-Century. By Joanne Major and Sarah Murden. Barnsley: Pen & Sword. 2019. Pp 170. £25.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781526744616; £8.32 (ebook), ISBN 9781526744630.

All Things Georgian: Tales from the Long Eighteenth Century takes its name from Joanna Major and Sarah Murden’s highly successful blog. The volume provides readers with an array of short narratives concerning life in Georgian England between 1714-1830 that are designed to illuminate the complexity – and at times, tragedy and hilarity – of Georgian life. Major and Murden have a track record as co-authors having published three full-length biographies of lesser-known Georgian women with Pen & Sword in recent years. This volume presents twenty-five new tales to the reader, recounted with the same genuine scholarly excitement and skills for storytelling that readers have come to expect from this partnership. From actresses plucked from the streets of London and thrust into the spotlight of The Beggar’s Opera, to the first flight of air balloons and the discoveries of female astronomer Caroline Herschel, this volume brings together some of the most intriguing stories of the Georgian period in one illuminating compendium. It is worth noting that as well as being a highly readable, enjoyable volume of short stories, it is clear that this book has been extensively researched. A glance down the ‘Notes and Sources’ pages gives the reader a sense of how familiar the writers must be with the inside of a Record Office.

Georgian women are certainly the stars of this volume, and it is refreshing to see so many tales with female protagonists from different ranks and social stations within the collection. What emerges from these stories is that a woman’s ability to succeed in this period was not always determined by their rank or by their ability to read and write, but instead owe a lot to skill, cunning, and a degree of luck. Intriguing accounts like that of Anne Rochford who rose from a nursery maid to gain royal favour as a coffee shop owner in the Royal Mews with a high-class of clientele despite being born illegitimate and made an orphan early in her childhood, exemplify this point. Readers interested in this theme will find the fate of sisters Sally and Maria Wallen particularly intriguing. Despite being sisters, these women entered into markedly different vocations: whilst ‘Crazy Sally’ became a famed female bonesetter at Epsom, her sister Maria Wallen found success playing Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera. Curiously for both women, the pinnacle of their success came during single life, indeed, both suffered disastrous marriages that lead to their respective downfalls. Maria ultimately ended up at the Old Bailey addressing charges of bigamy and was replaced by a younger actress, whilst Sally was abandoned by her husband who took her life savings with him, eventually being buried in a pauper’s grave. Of course such tales are tinged with sadness, but this volume is at its best when it is exploring the fortunes and fates of women like Anne, Sally, and Maria – women born into the lower echelons of society, forced to navigate their way through the complexities of Georgian public sphere and the harsh realities of life without the benefit of wealth or social security. By including these tales, the authors provide a much-needed insight into the Georgian period as a time of social change in which fortune, station, and marriage was not always a prerequisite for individual success.

Despite the well-selected range and scope of subjects in the twenty-five tales, there is one significant omission: the marked absence of minority groups in these tales. For example there were thousands of black servants and enslaved people in Britain in the 1770s and yet, the only clues one finds in this book to their existence is in some of the portraits and cartoon illustrations included alongside the main tales. Recent scholarship in this field has made significant strides in accounting for these and other minority groups in the Georgian period, indeed, one can even find evidence of Major and Murden’s telling stories about individuals from a minority background in their blog. Given the considerable work that has clearly gone into representing different facets of Georgian life and the populace of England, it is a shame, then, to find minorities largely omitted. The inclusion of accounts to this effect would have helped to represent the diversity of England’s populace during this period, and been a great asset to the reader grappling with the intricacies of Georgian Society.

On this note, though, additional praise should be given that in the production of this volume the authors have worked hard to source and include various pertinent illustrations – over 100, in fact – to accompany the main text. The visuals provided throughout help add texture to the tales, whilst demonstrating the distinctiveness of this period. Indeed, Major and Murden have created a well-structured and well-researched book that makes for highly pleasurable reading. The volume will appeal to both those familiar with this era, who are bound to find something new and intriguing amongst this rich collection, and more broadly, those interested in social-cultural history and women’s studies.

KATHERINE WOODHOUSE
Loughborough University

*Disclosure: Sarah Murden is a member of the Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837.

Briony McDonagh, Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700-1830

Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700-1830. By Briony McDonagh, London and New York: Routledge. 2018. Pp. 190. £110 (hardcover), £37 (paperback), ISBN 9781409456025.

In 1782, the leading bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu wrote the following letter to Elizabeth Carter boasting about her achievements as a landowner:

“[B]y Fees to Laywers, I laid out 36:000 in a purchase of Land, as good assurance of ye title; and by ye help architects, Masons, &c, I have built as good a House in Portman Square; & am now, by ye assistance of ye celebrated Messrs Brown & Wyatt, embellishing Sandleford within doors, & without as successfully, as if I was Esquire instead of Madame. All that I have mention’ has been effected in little more than 5 years, few gentlemen in ye Neighbourhood have done more.”

Written during the period succeeding the death of Montagu’s husband in 1775, after which she inherited considerable property, this letter fully expresses her pride in her work. For Briony McDonagh, this is a feminist statement, one in which Montagu expresses her deep belief that gender played no part in defining one’s capabilities as estate manager.

Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700-1830, abounds with such examples of aristocratic and genteel women who played an active role in the management of landed property, some of which owned the properties in question and some that did not. A study on feminist historical geography, McDonagh’s new book is the first large-scale quantitative study considering female landownership in this period, and it expertly revises many long-held assumptions on female management of property. While we might, as McDonagh states, “be forgiven for thinking female landowners didn’t exist in any real numbers” due to the lack of work done on the topic, her study argues that over 3 million acres in England would have been owned by women in the later eighteenth century, and more than 6 million acres in Great Britain as a whole. “While undoubtedly disadvantaged by primogeniture, coverture and various other legal devices,” as McDonagh concludes in her second book chapter, ‘Women, Land and Property,’ “Female landowners as a group consistently held somewhere in the region of 10 per cent of the land.”

Nor were women the passive vessels through which property made its way back to the hands of their male owners. McDonagh’s third chapter, ‘Managing the Estate,’ considers the active role that many single, married and widowed women played in estate management. In this chapter, McDonagh emphasises the importance of such practices as the keeping of account books, which allowed the female landowner to keep a record of her decision-making and achievements regarding the management of the estate for her heir and wider family. Elizabeth Prowse and the Duchess of Beaufort, for example, were responsible for the introduction of sophisticated systems of accounting that became the basis of bookkeeping practices in their respective estates for generations. Perhaps an even more impressive achievement was that of Anna Maria Agar, who after inheriting an incredibly encumbered estate from her uncle, cleared am eye-watering debt of £68,000 in only 15 years.

Equally impressive achievements by female landowners fill the pages of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 4, ‘Improving the Estate’ focuses on improvements introduced by women into their estates. The already-mentioned Montagu had cause to boast in 1790 of her “genius for farming” and the improvements originating from her “own prudence and activity,” since after her death in 1800 the value of her estates was estimated at £10,000 a year, a 33% increase on their annual value since the death of her husband. Though of more modest means than Montagu, Anne Lister achieved great successes in the management of Shibden Hall, which she inherited from her uncle in 1826. Instead of leasing out the mines in the estate, as had been the practice in her family, she managed them herself, and through a careful calculation of costs managed to offer better prices than those of her competitors. Both women, as McDonagh affirms, demonstrate how, much like their male counterparts, female landowners were “influenced by a wide intellectual commitment to the idea of improvement,” a discourse that combined economic concerns as well as ideas about the social and moral dimensions of improvement.

One of the most common and long-held assumptions about female property management has been that by the early eighteenth century single, married and widowed women played little to no part in the management of large agricultural estates. This is an assumption against which McDonagh continues to successfully argue in the fifth chapter, ‘Country houses, gardens and estate villages.’ In this chapter, McDonagh argues that, much like their male counterparts, female landowners were “important figureheads in the local community, where they demanded votes and deference, and sometimes also on a regional and national stage.” McDonagh presents examples of several women who, by undertaking comprehensive programmes of building works, asserted their power and constructed their identities around their property management. To suggest, as scholars before McDonagh have done, that female landowners would inevitably have been less interested in altering the landscapes of their estates “is to vastly underestimate the degree in which gentle and aristocratic women acted to articulate, bolster and defend the status, power and wealth of their class.”

Whilst emphasising the active role that so many women played in the management of estates and their involvement in areas of activity far beyond their households, McDonagh is nevertheless deeply mindful of the ways in which their gender influenced their experience of landownership and estate management. This is the particular focus of the sixth chapter, ‘Representing women and property.’ As McDonagh points out, coverture made it difficult for women to sign leases and pursue legal proceedings, as well as keep their property out of the control of their husbands, even in cases in which they held it as separate estates. The majority of women would have also been educated at home, receiving an education generally focused on social and domestic rather than intellectual accomplishments, and they were also less likely to have practical experience of estate management than men of comparable age and status. Even dress would have been a factor that would have made their experience a gendered one. Indeed, one of the most vivid examples McDonagh provides is that of Amabel Hume-Campbell, whose letters describe in great detail her long walks through the landscape despite her lack of suitable clothes, which often resulted in her having to walk in wet shoes and sometimes even barefoot.

McDonagh leaves her stamp on the field of property studies with this deeply original and masterfully researched work which, besides making an unarguably valuable contribution to history and human geography, it is also important reading for scholars considering the portrayal of propertied women beyond these two subjects. For anyone interested in the portrayal of female property owners in literature, for example, this work is just as essential. Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape vividly brings to life the distinct and powerful ways in which women experienced, modified and improved the eighteenth-century landscape, and it will undoubtedly influence future contributions to the field of property studies.

RITA J. DASHWOOD
University of Warwick

Jennie Batchelor and Gillian Dow, Women’s Writing, 1660-1830: Feminisms and Futures

Women’s Writing, 1660-1830: Feminisms and Futures. Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Gillian Dow. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. Pp 266. £89.99 (hardcover), ISBN 9781137543813.

‘Feminisms and Futures’ is a supremely fitting appellation for this volume of waypoints and landmarks. Born out of Chawton House Library’s tenth anniversary conference in 2013, this collection of essays is self-consciously circumspect and candid in its assessment of feminist literary history. As Batchelor and Dow express in their introduction, the field is dynamic, progressive, and often contradictory. Since Chawton House Library’s opening in 2003, the landscape of feminist literary study has matured and shifted. Both within and beyond the academy, the intervening years have seen feminist scholars tenaciously seek new ways to recover women’s writings and reinforce women writers’ cultural presence, from Adrianne Wadewitz’s Wikipedia edit-a-thons and Caroline Criado-Perez’s campaign to ‘Keep a Woman’ on English bank notes, to, alternatively, Marisa Fuentes’ work on the lives of women of colour and the simultaneous presence and erasure of their voices within colonial archives. Yet, the systemic bias remains, and there is still much work to be done. The essays contained in Women’s Writing, 1660-1830 offer a crucial opportunity to pause, reflect, and assess the direction – or indeed multiple directions – in which feminist literary history is, could, and should be headed.

The urgent questions at the heart of this volume chiefly surround the ‘recovery project’ around women’s writing. The query of whether the recovery project has ‘achieved its goal’ is quickly dissected and problematised. Instead of a simplistic and potentially dismissive and counter-productive call for work ‘beyond recovery’, Batchelor, Dow and their authors instead carve out a nuanced and diverse assemblage of avenues in which the voices of women writers and readers can continue to be accessed and studied. The introduction, as well as essays by Ros Ballaster, Katherine Binhammer, Isobel Grundy, and Dow, unflinchingly grapple with the potential for isolation or elitism within women’s literary history as a distinct field. Indeed, the impact of scholarly work on the realities of higher education is valiantly approached: the exclusionary and unaffordable cost of editions of women’s writing, the white, Anglo-centric nature of the field, and the teaching of women writers in the classroom.

Flanked by Grundy’s preface and Cora Kaplan’s postscript, the volume underscores the centrality of literary study to feminist scholarship. Grundy reiterates the ways in which women’s writing continues to be a ‘daring choice’ (p. 9) for scholars to pursue, and sets a tone of boldness, scholarly, social, and pedagogical responsibility and intellectual rigour which carries through the volume. Ballaster’s chapter on the place of the aesthetic navigates the place given to aesthetic judgement and the privileging of literary forms of writing, and opens up a key question throughout the volume: what counts as women’s writing? Economics and professionalism are key issues within the volume, and their influence on how women’s writing has traditionally been defined is nuanced within the essays. E. J. Clery raises the part played by neo-liberal ideology in shaping the study of women’s writing and demonstrates the ways in which the economic is addressed in women’s writing. M.O. Grenby considers the professionalisation of women’s writing of children’s literature and the economic valuation of writing by women. Batchelor’s essay on anonymity grapples with the professional and amateur author, alongside the uncomfortable image of modesty, deference, and silence which surrounds works ‘by a lady’, or indeed the ungendered ‘Anon’. Drawing from the wealth of ‘Anon’ work in periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine, Batchelor makes a convincing case for the inclusion of such anonymous texts within the remit of women’s writing. Similarly, Elaine McGirr further diversifies the parameters of the women writer through the performative utterances of Nell Gwynn and Susannah Arne Cribber.

Alongside who and what counts as women’s writing, the frameworks and methodologies through which it is approached and taught are considered. Binhammer skilfully navigates the categorisation and signification of the women in women’s writing, and makes a case for the need to marry eighteenth-century literature with feminist theory within pedagogical contexts. Marie-Louise Coolahan and Mark Empey interrogate book ownership and access in order to assess the impact of women’s writing upon the make-up of libraries, deftly demonstrating how the ‘neo-liberal university’s appetite for quantification and empirical research’ (p. 67) can be turned to fruitful ends in feminist literary scholarship. Chloe Wigston Smith challenges the notion that taking up the pen necessitates abandoning the needle, and reflects upon the relationship between material objects and their literary representations. Aligning feminine literary and material practices, Smith celebrates the feminist potential of the ‘material turn’.

The geographical borders, and the crossing and interrogation of those boundaries, dominate the final two essays in the volume. Sarah Prescott tackles the persistent problems around the synonymous use of British for English, and the consequent exclusion of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh women’s voices. The juncture of national identity and gender, and their impact upon differing notions of value and authorship, literary aesthetic, and professionalism, underline the importance of intersectional considerations. Opening out the conversation again to consider pan-European writing, Dow’s chapter also turns to the mapping of women writers’ lives. Noting that the dismissal of biography and bio-bibliographical surveys have been heavily scorned and dismissed, Dow brings the discussion back toward the so-called success of the recovery project.

One of the many impressive – but not explicitly highlighted – aspects of this book is the plethora of references to projects, databases and networks which have contributed to the study of women’s literary history over the years. Coolahan and Empey’s Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700 informs their chapter, Prescott’s Women’s Poetry from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales: 1400-1800 similarly informs her contribution, while the impact of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is mentioned by Ballaster, Clery and Binhammer alike. As Batchelor and Dow reflect in their introduction, the catch-all phrasing of a ‘recovery project’ is misleading in suggesting a cohesive, strategized, and unified movement. The essays in this volume reflect and embrace the diversity of projects, perspectives and approaches, even occasionally crossing disciplinary lines. Encompassing the professional and amateur, print and manuscript, the canonical and the overlooked and undervalued, Batchelor and Dow champion a vision for the future of feminist literary history which is both grounded in the realistic issues that abound in humanities scholarship, and refreshingly inclusionary.

SERENA DYER
De Montfort University

Robin Runia, The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery

The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery. Edited by Robin Runia. New York and London: Routledge. 2018. Pp. 185. £110.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781138571372.

Robin Runia’s edited collection The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery makes both a fascinating and timely historiographical intervention within eighteenth-century literary studies. This is a discipline that for some time has enacted important acts of recovery, particularly by recentring into the forefront of critical discussion, women writers, editors, and critics who have traditionally fallen outside of literary canons. As Runia’s ‘Introduction’ sets out, the collection represents an attempt to argue for the continued necessity of such feminist scholarship of eighteenth-century literature in the face of perceptions that this important work has now been ‘done’. Yet, in the age of the digital humanities, in which a huge number of eighteenth-century texts have been made available through digitisation projects, the recovery of forgotten texts by women writers is easier than ever. At the same time, the important shifts that have characterised feminist movements in the last few years, such as #MeToo and the rise of intersectional approaches, mean that a critical reassessment of this feminist scholarship, including the politics and methodologies that underpin ‘recovery’, has never been more necessary.

Collectively, the various essays included in this volume highlight the continued vibrancy of feminist scholarship of eighteenth-century literature. Together the chapters represent a broad range of approaches to the idea of recovery, with some authors actively considering recovery as a framework for their scholarship, and others passively employing the methodologies associated with it (such as reassessing existing accounts, and bringing new attention to overlooked women authors) as part of their analyses. Of the latter, Karen Bloom Gevirtz’s chapter, ‘Philosophy and/in Verse: Jane Barker’s “Farewell to Poetry” and the Anatomy of Verse’, offers a compelling reassessment of Jane Barker’s use of rhetoric and structure in the ‘investigation and explication of the experience of feeling’ (55) within the experimental philosophy of the New Science. Likewise, Jennifer L. Avery’s chapter, ‘The “English Sappho’s” Daughter: Reading the Works of Maria Elizabeth Robinson’, argues for the necessity of a critical reassessment of Robinson’s works, particularly her gothic novel, The Shrine of Bertha.

However, the volume is most successful when it tackles issues of recovery head on. Kate Parker’s essay ‘Recovery and Translation in Cross-Channel Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing’, for example, makes an important argument about the nature of the texts that feminist scholarship has previously favoured for recovery, that is, the privileging of ‘original’ and ‘creative’ writing over the intellectual work associated with the production of translated texts. As such, Parker’s chapter demonstrates how recovery, normally viewed as an act which disrupts traditional notions of value as ascribed to canonical texts, in fact reproduces, albeit in a different form, this hierarchical approach to literary culture.

Beyond this theoretical emphasis, the volume is also concerned with contemporary relevance of historic texts, with a number of essays asking how the reading and recovery of these eighteenth-century narratives might shed light on current attitudes, ideas, and issues. For example, Shawn Lisa Maurer’s chapter, ‘Lydia Still: Adolescent Wildness in Pride and Prejudice,’ asks how our reading of Lydia Bennet shifts when we read her through a contemporary lens, as a stereotypical ‘teenager’. Likewise, Brittany Pladek’s chapter ‘Beyond the Poet-Physician: Letitia Landon’s Reader-Centred Therapy,’ attempts to redefine and bring nuance to the stock figure of the poet-physician by integrating Landon’s reader-oriented model. In so doing, she asks how recovering ‘alternate traditions of literary medicine’ might offer ‘a historical resource for present and future approaches to humanistic healing’ (72).

Perhaps the most useful consideration of the relationship between past text and literary present, however, is Cynthia Richards’s contribution to the collection. This chapter attempts to square what Richards refers to as ‘the transhistorical nature of trauma studies’ (15) with historicist accounts of the eighteenth-century, reading the rape of Richardson’s Clarissa in relation to DSM-IV and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, she highlights the lack of trauma studies within eighteenth-century studies, enacting her own kind of productive recovery by bringing these two fields into conversation. Although the type of retrospective diagnosis intimated by this approach is often bemoaned by historicists, the chapter highlights how these readings resonate with current readers of the text, specifically students. Richards’s account provocatively draws out the unavoidable contemporary resonances of books like Clarissa in an age of #MeToo, thereby offering a compelling exploration of the dynamic potential of using the lens of trauma studies to interrogate these historic documents.

This dual emphasis on history and present day is also echoed in the volume’s attention to the figure of the reader, who appears in both contemporaneous and current forms throughout. In her modern manifestations in the volume, a critically-aware author-reader emerges who rethinks eighteenth-century texts through multiple layers of historiography, the current cultural and political climate, and personal experience. Indeed, both Runia’s introduction and Richards’s piece reflect on their own experiences from panels at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference, framing these discussions in relation to the acts of recovery their own scholarship enacts. The eighteenth-century author-reader is also given attention through Stacey L. Kikendall’s account, ‘(Imprudent Travel): The Politics of Locations and the Gendered Experience in Mary Wollstonecraft’s and Mary Shelley’s Travel Writing’. In this essay, Kikendall skilfully reads the women’s travel writing in terms of a dialogue of included versus excluded detail, wherein the prudent author anticipates the aspects of a text that might be judged as imprudent by its potential readers and edits accordingly. Like Runia and Richards’s contributions, Kikendall’s essay is dependent on a dense historiography around both women and their writing, including edited private letters and biographical texts, which serve to sharpen Kikendall’s reading of Wollstonecraft’s and Shelley’s authorial prudence, resulting in a complex analysis of authorship that functions on multiple levels and through different timeframes.

As such, each of these chapters offers a refreshing analysis or use of recovery as a strategy for writing about eighteenth-century literature, as inflected by previous scholarship, present debates, and digital technologies. Yet ‘recovery’ as feminist praxis is not simply a literary concern, particularly within eighteenth-century studies. Indeed, important work has been done on once obscure women artists such as Anne Seymour Damer and Mary Linwood, while the field examining women’s material and craft productions during this period is flourishing. Due to the hierarchical divisions between art and craft that have previously characterised canonical art historical scholarship on the period, such work has reflected deeply on the utility and limitations of feminist recovery as a methodology. As such, I feel that the broader implications of this study could be more successfully teased out through an interdisciplinary volume, one that reflects the multitudinous approaches to recovery that characterise research undertaken by a wide range of scholars working in the highly interdisciplinary field of eighteenth-century studies. Emily M. N. Kugler’s essay, ‘Fantasies of Emancipation: Collaborations and Contestations in The History of Mary Prince’, is one of the few essays in this volume to take advantage of such an approach, using a compelling analysis of surviving material objects against the texts which are part of her discussion, which together work to show how new digital approaches can bring material and textual cultures into fascinating dialogue.

Overall however,The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery represents a welcome addition to the reflexive historiographical conversations that have long characterised eighteenth-century studies. Just as Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown’s The New Eighteenth-Century: Theory, Politics and English Literature asked vital questions about the discipline’s use of (and then resistance to) theory in 1988, so too does Runia’s edited volume offer an important reassessment of those concerns and methodologies in light of the current scholarly and cultural climate.

FREYA GOWRLEY
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art