Tag: book review

Elisabetta Sirani. By Adelina Modesti. London: Lund Humphries. 2023. Pp. 144 + 65 colour and 12 black and white illustrations. £35.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9781848224971. By Anna Pratley

This is the first of three reviews we will be publishing on the Illuminating Women Artists series, edited by Andrea Pearson and Marilyn Dunn, and published by Lund Humphries. The beautifully illustrated volumes in this series explore the lives and works of women artists, many of whom have been previously overlooked in the history of art. To begin, Anna Pratley discusses the volume on Elisabetta Sirani.

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Built upon decades of dedicated research and an informed analysis of recent developments in scholarly thought, Adelina Modesti’s contribution to the Illuminating Women Artists series is essential reading for any student or enthusiast seeking an overview of the remarkable life and work of Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665). By seamlessly weaving into the text faithful English translations of seventeenth-century Italian sources and non-judgemental explanations of art historical terminology, Modesti has forged a highly accessible narrative which is gripping, informative, and truly illuminating.

Modesti begins by providing an impressively concise overview of the contemporary issues which shaped Sirani as an artist, including those relating to her family, education, and influential sociopolitical debates associated with the Counter-Reformation. Alongside addressing topics familiar to the scholar of early modern women, such as the Querelle des Femmes (‘Woman Question’), it also considers those factors unique to Bologna which allowed women artists to flourish. The most significant of these is the “matrilineal pedagogic model”, a term coined by Modesti to acknowledge Bologna’s encouragement of women teaching other women (p.19). Readers who wish to delve further into recent archival discoveries relating to the success of Bolognese women artists are appropriately signposted to Babette Bohn’s Women Artists, their Patrons, and their Publics in Early Modern Bologna (Penn State University Press, 2021).

Chapter 2 evaluates Sirani’s training, artistic influences, technique, and style. In accordance with Linda Nochlin’s 1971 argument – that the disadvantages faced by women artists should not be employed as an intellectual position – Modesti emphasises the wealth of resources available to Sirani: plaster casts, sculptures, paintings, drawings, palace collections, churches, books, and religious festivities to name a few. Relevant archival materials support investigations into Sirani’s colleagues and apprentices, particularly Lorenzo Tinti (1626–1672), whose artistic relationship with the maestra has not yet received its due focus and would be worth further investigation. A short paragraph on Sirani’s little-known caricatures (p.50) presents a similarly tantalising opportunity for further research.

However, it is Modesti’s ability to paint a picture of Sirani’s genuine passion for her profession which remains the most illuminating aspect of this chapter, and indeed of the whole monograph. Of note are personal anecdotes from Sirani’s biographer and friend, Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–1693); one of these (p.41) recalls the artist’s repeated visits to a jewellery shop to view a much-loved painting, and her subsequent avoidance of returning out of embarrassment for spending so much time admiring it. Descriptions of Sirani’s technique are just as evocative, for instance, how her experiments with wet-on-wet paint application created a “shimmering quality to the surface of her paintings” (p.32).  Modesti’s writing brings Sirani to life in this chapter, allowing her youth, character, and talent to radiate from the glossy printed reproductions of her works. It is a must-read example of how to introduce a non-specialist audience to the world of art history.

A natural progression from the previous chapter, Chapter 3 covers the themes, subjects, and iconography of Sirani’s works. An examination of Sirani’s religious paintings considers their propensity for use in spiritual reflection, a significant role for artworks in the Counter-Reformation. The suggestion that Sirani’s depictions of Saint Anne gained popularity as exemplars of the aforementioned matrilineal pedagogic model is insightful and well-supported. Perhaps the most successful use of images appears in this section (pp.64–65). The rich red, white, and blue drapery of Sirani’s Virgin and Child (1663) is complemented by that of the adjacent Salvator Mundi (c.1655–8), while a self-portrait sketch apparently used as the basis of the latter work is displayed alongside it, allowing direct comparison.

However, Modesti’s examination of Sirani’s historical heroines is tenuous in places. Her argument that the formal composition of Timoclea may have been inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1620) (p.78) is a refreshing addition to the discourse; yet one cannot help feeling that this was an attempt to shoehorn in a connection between two women artists where there is no extant evidence that they had any knowledge of each other’s works. More perplexing is the lack of any reference to Amy Golhany’s 2011 article – which recognises the irrefutable similarity between Sirani’s Timoclea and an earlier eponymous print by Matthaüs Merian (1593–1650) – despite its inclusion in Modesti’s select bibliography.

It is also worth noting that the section on anti-heroines assumes the authenticity of an Iole (1662), a Cleopatra (c.1664), and a Circe (c.1664), all of which have contested authorship. Modesti is known for taking an enthusiastic approach to attributions, sparking much debate with the other primary scholar on Sirani, Babette Bohn. The reader should remain conscious of this and take a critical approach to new attributions in this work. Chapter 1, for instance, attributes a painting traditionally thought to be by Sirani to her sister Barbara. The curious reader will discover that the ‘reference’ supporting this claim is a link to a Facebook image of the work with no caption, posted to the page of the Galleria Umbria Perugia in 2022. There are, I am sure, reasons behind this assertion, but without knowing them it is difficult to judge its validity.

Chapter 4 offers an extensive evidence-based analysis of the artist’s patronage networks and modes of self-representation. Of note are some previously unrecognised connections with the Medici, including commissions from a Medici courtier, the chief administrative officer of the Medici military company, and a Bolognese statesman in the service of a Medici cardinal (p.99). Modesti’s chronological analysis of Sirani’s notebook is a particularly helpful guide to the evolution of the artist’s popularity over time. Towards the end of this chapter, the inclusion of visual reproductions of contemporary laude (figs. 69 and 70, p.110) adds valuable weight to the running emphasis on the artist’s impressive reputation.

Modesti’s concluding chapter is fittingly dedicated to documenting the posthumous memory of Sirani. This section provides a stark reminder of the tragedy of Sirani’s untimely death, supported by detailed descriptions of her funeral proceedings and three moving contemporary letters mourning her loss. A brief but comprehensive analysis of Sirani’s critical reception through time follows. This section subtly emphasises the important role played by women in preserving Sirani’s memory across the centuries, from Carolina Bonafede’s 1856 biographic play to the use of the Timoclea in the #MeToo movement. The commemorative plaque now adorning Sirani’s home could potentially have provided further support for Modesti’s comments on the early twentieth-century dismissal of Sirani’s works as imitations of her predecessor, Guido Reni (1575–1642). However, this omission does not detract from the success of this chapter.

Just as Sirani produced an astonishing 200+ paintings in just over a decade of work, Modesti’s book encompasses a vast amount of research in just 144 pages. This need for concision results in a few minor lapses in academic rigour, mostly in the justifications for attributions. Nonetheless, this book provides a much-needed point of entry into the world of Elisabetta Sirani, reminding us that many historical women artists are still awaiting equal representation outside of the boundaries of academia.

Anna Pratley recently graduated from the Warburg Institute with an MA (Dist.) in Art History, Curatorship and Renaissance Culture. Her research interests include amateur women miniaturists working in seventeenth-century England, the domestic lives of the “middle class” in the long eighteenth century, and the application of feminist surveillance theory to women’s self-portraiture.

Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing: Scandalous Lessons. Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland. Review by Cheryll Duncan.

Venanzio Rauzzini and the Birth of a New Style in English Singing: Scandalous Lessons. By Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. Pp 244. 11 B/W Illustrations. £130.00 (hardback) £29.24 (ebook), ISBN 9780367443375.

The Italian castrato Venanzio Rauzzini (1746–1810) spent some 36 years in Britain, where he made a significant contribution to the musical and cultural life of the nation. His multi-faceted career was chronicled in Paul F. Rice’s monograph Venanzio Rauzzini in Britain: Castrato, Composer, and Cultural Leader (2015), which concluded that Rauzzini’s most enduring legacy was ‘his teaching of a generation of leading soloists and his development of the Bath concerts’ (p. 285). While his activities as a concert director account for a generous proportion of the book, however, little attention is given to Rauzzini’s achievements as an educator. Robertson-Kirkland’s study fills this gap in the literature by examining the singer’s influence through the lens of his teaching, probing the pedagogical methods and socio-historic contexts that contributed to his producing some of the finest singers of the period. It unpacks the loyal network of relationships that Rauzzini built with his students, revealing how he cultivated a respectable public image in order to navigate the culture of suspicion that surrounded music masters generally, and castrati in particular.  

After an opening ‘Prelude’ that sets out the book’s novel agenda, chapter one provides an overview of British music education in the eighteenth century, pointing up the distinction between the rigorous training that Rauzzini received in Italy and the unregulated system of apprenticeships and private tuition that prevailed in Britain. Arriving in London in 1774 to take up the role of primo uomo at the King’s Theatre, Rauzzini brought with him a wealth of knowledge of Italian music pedagogy at a time when Italian opera and vocal methods were highly respected. Having already established himself as an operatic star and singing master on the continent, the timing was opportune for Rauzzini to hone his skills in Britain. He was also well placed to use his celebrity status to promote his own students on the London stage, and chapter two explores the mixed reception given to two such individuals. Caterina Schindlerin failed to make a lasting impression and prompted Charles Burney to grumble about ‘the number of Italian singers who insisted their inferior students perform with them in the opera’ (p. 43). Anna Selina (Nancy) Storace was only ten when Rauzzini assigned her a minor role in his opera Le ali d’Amore in 1776 (Storace’s performances 1773–1778 are listed in Appendix 1). After completing her training in Italy, she went on to enjoy considerable success, not least as Mozart’s first Susanna in Le nozze de Figaro.  

Rauzzini’s activity as a teacher was closely linked to the musical and cultural life of Bath, where from 1780 his own prestigious concert series provided a public platform for his growing network of associates. Chapter three compares the vocal techniques and careers of Gertrud Mara and Elizabeth Billington, both leading sopranos who regularly sang at these concerts. Claims that they were formally trained by Rauzzini are shown to be unlikely, however, although both women were certainly part of the musical circle that promoted his reputation. The next chapter unpacks why Rauzzini was dubbed ‘the father of a new style in English singing’, contrasting English and Italian vocal techniques and explaining how the two melded to create a ‘new style’. Although unable to father children of his own, Rauzzini spawned a generation of celebrity British-born singers through his teaching of Italian vocal technique. Chapter five explores this method through a detailed account of Rauzzini’s Twelve Solfeggi (1808), a treatise aimed at the advanced student and which sealed his pedagogical legacy. The concepts and history of the solfeggi tradition are lucidly explained and shown to be a versatile training tool that was fundamental to musical literacy and vocal flexibility. Rauzzini’s exemplary musicianship can be attributed to his own study of solfeggi, which was the standard method taught in the Italian conservatories and continues to inform vocal pedagogy today.

Chapters six and seven engage with the ‘scandalous lessons’ of the book’s subtitle, amusingly reflected in the caricature by Thomas Rowlandson chosen for its cover. During his early years in Bath, Rauzzini’s pupils included wealthy young women for whom musical skill was an expected accomplishment, and in which context his renowned good looks and geniality made him susceptible to slander. In 1779 he was publicly accused by William Gooch of a romantic involvement with his wife Elizabeth while she was Rauzzini’s pupil. The assumptions underlying this incident provide a platform for exploring fictional narratives that played into contemporary attitudes concerning music masters, particularly foreign ones. George Colman the elder’s comic afterpiece The Musical Lady (1762) satirised the British infatuation with Italian music and musicians through its portrayal of Sophy, a young woman whose moral judgement was swayed by ‘an unhealthy attachment to music and Italians’ (p. 132). 

Although Rauzzini emerged from the Gooch incident relatively unscathed, other singers in his circle were less fortunate, and those whose careers were harmed by their involvement in scandal are discussed in chapter seven. Gertrud Mara’s liaison with Charles Florio prompted Joseph Haydn to declare her behaviour to be ‘despicable to the whole nation’ (p. 155), while Nancy Storace’s affair with John Braham, another of Rauzzini’s students, elicited considerable opprobrium in the press. Framing these case studies is an anecdote concerning a romantic entanglement immediately prior to Rauzzini’s arrival in England, recounted years later by the tenor Michael Kelly in his Reminiscences (1826, I, p.10). The story was unsubstantiated and received scant notice at the time, but it has recently been appropriated by a media keen to exploit public curiosity around castrati, particularly their perceived gender and sexual function. Thus an article in The Guardian in 2010 headlined Rauzzini as ‘the bedhopping singing star of the 1700s’, describing him as ‘a ladies’ man, a kind of castrato Casanova, sleeping his way round Europe’.

Intriguingly entitled ‘The Eighteenth Century in the Twenty-First Century’, the Postlude opens with an admission that we know very little about what Rauzzini’s singing lessons actually entailed, because of the intrinsically private nature of the teaching space. The one-to-one lesson is still the primary model for vocal and instrumental instruction today, and Robertson-Kirkland does not shy away from drawing parallels between potential hazards of the teacher-pupil relationship 350 years ago and those in the present. Reference to recent abusive behaviour and sexual grooming at a specialist music school in the UK makes uncomfortable reading but is effective in highlighting the timeliness and relevance of this study.

Overall, this is a fascinating investigation of teaching in relation to the education of professional and amateur singers in Georgian Britain, set in its wider cultural and social context. The writing is clear and engaging, and the scholarship lightly worn while underpinned by meticulous archival work of an interdisciplinary nature. There is a useful appendix containing short biographies of 47 singers advertised as Rauzzini’s pupils, the majority of whom are women. Comprehensive end notes for each chapter are supplemented by a detailed bibliography of manuscripts and published sources, and the excellent index will ensure the book’s usefulness as a reference tool. As a study that places teaching at the centre of the socio-historical narrative, it is a welcome addition to Routledge’s Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies series and deserves a wide readership.  

Cheryll Duncan

Cheryll Duncan is Emeritus Professor of Musicology at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK. She publishes on professional music culture in Britain during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a particular focus on records of the equity and common-law courts. 

Actresses of the Restoration Period: Mrs Elizabeth Barry and Mrs Anne Bracegirdle. Susan Margaret Cooper. Review by Annette Rubery.

Actresses of the Restoration Period: Mrs Elizabeth Barry and Mrs Anne Bracegirdle. By Susan Margaret Cooper. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword History. 2023. Pp 224. £22.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781399064804.

Susan Margaret Cooper is in the somewhat rare position amongst theatre historians. She is herself descended from a stalwart of the 18th-century stage, Roger Bridgwater, who trod the boards in London for 31 years, and whose biography she published in 2020. This new work is a double biography of two actresses, who, although forgotten today, were hugely influential figures of the Restoration stage. Aside from various biographical dictionary appearances, Cooper’s book is the first mainstream publication to tackle the lives of Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle, and to put them into context.

Actresses of the Restoration Period opens with an overview of Restoration London’s cultural scene, before turning to Mrs Barry (‘Mrs’ was the proper form of address for professional actresses, being an abbreviation of ‘mistress’, i.e., one who is skilled at something). Despite the indignity of being considered plain and ‘indifferent plump’, Barry nonetheless made a vital contribution to the British stage, especially in the tragic repertoire. According to Cooper, she inspired passion in the playwright Thomas Otway, and was the lover of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, with whom she had a daughter (Elizabeth or ‘Little Barry’).

Cooper has sifted the sources, giving us excerpts of scandalous poetry and material spoken by Barry in the form of prologues and epilogues. One difficulty, given the lack of primary source material, is capturing Barry’s personality, but Cooper draws on some rare sources including a transcription of a letter by the actress, held at the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

She also provides interesting reflections on Barry’s sudden illness at Drury Lane in 1688 while acting in John Crowne’s Darius, King of Persia. George Granville wrote that Barry ‘was forced to be carried off, and instead of dying in jest was in danger of doing it in earnest’ (p. 52). Cooper notes that the actress did not return to the stage for 18 months. Putting the incident in the context of her daughter’s illness (who died the following year), she speculates that Barry may have been suffering from a nervous breakdown.

In the case of Mrs Bracegirdle (or ‘Bracey’ as she was affectionately known) Cooper presents some excellent research on the actress’s Northampton relatives and childhood. She also covers her friendship with the playwright William Congreve: ‘It was rumoured by contemporaries that her friendship with Congreve might have been more than just platonic, he regularly visited her until his death in 1729’ (p. 113). In fact, Congreve lodged with Bracey’s sister (Mrs Frances Porter), and his involvement with the Kit-Cat Club helped to establish Thomas Betterton’s new theatre company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where both Barry and Bracegirdle performed.

Bracey (who was famed for her chastity) remained unmarried, although the poet, playwright and Shakespearean scholar, Nicholas Rowe, also fell heavily for her charms. As Cooper shows, his attentions were unrequited, resulting in the publication of some disparaging verses:

Of proffers large her choice had she,

Of jewels, plate, and land in fee,

Which she with scorn rejected:

And can a nymph so virtuous be

Of base-born blood suspected?

(p. 118).

Whether or not this rather simplistic poetry came from Rowe (who was made Poet Laureate in 1715) or a satirical imitator, it’s not clear, and herein lies the problem. The reader of Actresses of the Restoration Period would have benefitted from a closer interrogation of the sources than Cooper provides. Elsewhere she quotes an anecdote about Nathanial Lee’s The Rival Queens, where Barry (playing Roxana) lets jealousy of her co-star, Elizabeth Boutell (Statira), get the better of her during the murder scene at the close of the play: ‘Roxana hastening the designed Blow, struck with such Force, that tho’ the Point of the Dagger was blunted, it made way through Mrs. Boutel’s [sic] Stayes, and entered about a Quarter of an Inch in the Flesh’ (p. 67).

What Cooper doesn’t mention is that the anecdote came from The History of the English Stage (1741) and was therefore probably the work of the scurrilous and unreliable publisher Edmund Curll. Not only did the story appear more than 60 years after the supposed incident, but the tale of one actress almost stabbing the other during The Rival Queens quickly became part of the play’s mythology (it re-emerged in 1756 in the context of Peg Woffington and George Anne Bellamy’s performances as Roxana and Statira, for example). Was it a real incident or simply a fable that grew into a marketing strategy? The proliferation of anecdotes is one of the central challenges of writing theatrical history, especially in the Restoration period, when eye-witness accounts were rare.

However, Cooper is a genial guide, and her work is to be applauded, given her necessary reliance on poetry and other secondary sources. The book offers an engaging series of plates, including the interiors and exteriors of playhouses, maps and manuscripts. Cooper also provides a useful list of the actresses’ theatrical repertoire, along with comprehensive extracts from a huge range of 17th-century material. Barry and Bracegirdle were just as recognisable to Restoration theatregoers as Nell Gwyn, but they have not persisted in the public imagination nearly as well. Actresses of the Restoration Period not only brings these fascinating women back into view, it tackles a complex period that’s ripe for further research.

Annette Rubery

Annette Rubery is an independent scholar and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She was awarded a PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies by the University of Warwick in 1999. She has since published a book of local history, Lichfield Then & Now (The History Press, 2012) and is currently writing a full-length biography of the 18th-century actress, Peg Woffington. Annette’s personal website is http://www.annetterubery.co.uk/.

Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800. Chelsea Phillips. Review by Sara Read

Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689-1800. Chelsea Phillips. Newark, New Jersey: University of Delaware Press. 2022. $34.95, 304 pages, 15 b-w images (paperback) ISBN 9781644532485

With the Restoration of the monarchy and the now famous warrant from Charles II in 1662 that women rather than boy actors were now to play all female roles, it was inevitable that theatrical companies would have to work around occasions when their leading ladies were pregnant, lying in, or nursing infants.  By the late eighteenth century, however, Covent Garden theatre was declared by Rambler’s Magazine to be the “‘most prolific place in England’” because six of its “female performers were pregnant or lying in” during the 1784 season (p. 208). Scholars of the Restoration stage have long acknowledged that actresses worked whilst pregnant and have made assumptions about what parts an actress could or could not perform in whilst expecting a baby. Chelsea Phillips’s study of six London actresses’ personal and professional lives across the long eighteenth century is a significant intervention to the field as it looks afresh at actresses who were famous in varying degrees during their reproductive years and centres their experiences. Phillips’s careful use of performance history and other records adds nuance to many of the pre-existing assumptions about pregnant women’s experiences in the theatre. For example, Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen was in her third pregnancy when playing Mrs Wittwoud in Thomas Southern’s The Wives Excuse, or Cuckolds Make Themselves in the 1691-92 theatre season. The play premiered in December when Mountford Verbruggen was midway through this pregnancy. She gave birth to Elizabeth Mountfort on 22 March the following year (under twelve months after her delivery of Edward on 1 April 1691, which too came under a year after Susanna’s birth on 27 April 1690). Phillips makes the case that rather than this being an expedient casting to accommodate the pregnancy, Mountfort Verbruggen was well-known as a comic actress and the pregnancy may even have been advantageous to the role since Mrs Wittwoud was “adapt at pawning illegitimate pregnancies off on unsuspecting husbands” (pp. 46-47). This sort of reappraisal makes Phillips’ book invaluable to those interested in theatre studies, women’s studies, and early celebrity.

This study is organised chronologically around the lives of its subjects, but not all chapters take the same approach. So, Chapter One, “Inheriting Greatness” begins with Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen and Anne Oldfield. The women’s careers overlapped in the Drury Lane company by four years. They are connected in the study as “for both women, pregnancy aided the development of a new line of business” (p. 31).  In the 1712-13 season Oldfield continued performing in The Distrest Mother, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, almost until she gave birth. She appeared as Andromache regularly between September 1712 and April 1713; the later performances would have been particularly poignant as Andromache sacrifices herself and her unborn child (p. 57). So just as for Mountfort Verbruggen, pregnancy helped her develop “parts that capitalised on the grotesque comic potential of the pregnant body[,] for Oldfield, portraying noble tragic heroines whose stoic natures enabled her to construct her pregnant body as classically contained” (p. 31).

Values and social expectations changed during the course of the long eighteenth century and so Chapter Two “Pregnant Sensibility: Susannah Cibber and George Anne Bellamy” considers the challenges faced by two rival actresses in “integrating pregnancy into their professional work in the age of sensibility” (p. 31). Chapters Three “Conceiving Genius: Sarah Siddons” and Four “Prolific Muse: Dorothy Jordon” also “function as a pair,” according to Phillips, because they consider the “similarities and differences in reception and self-fashioning for two women living very different lives” (p. 32). Jordan was the most prolific of the actresses in this study, having at least eighteen pregnancies in her thirty-year career. Thankfully, Carrying All Before Her contains a useful appendix listing the known births and baptism dates of the subjects’ children (pp. 223-34).

In thinking about early celebrity, Phillips raises the question of audience response to the loss of a famous actress. Mountfort Verbruggen died a few months after giving birth to son Lewis Verbruggen. Mountfort Verbruggen’s death did not attract the kinds of public mourning which followed the murder of her first husband William Mountfort, but Phillips considers whether audiences thought of her when watching the production of Oroonoko which was staged in the weeks following her death. Was watching Oroonoko’s grief for pregnant Imoinda all the more poignant (p. 48)? Phillips’s detailed analysis of the effects of Sarah Siddons’s visible pregnancies to her renowned performances of Lady Macbeth in 1785 and 1794 again asks questions of the way an audience might interpret that body in relation to the character (pp. 136-142).

Readers of Carrying All Before Her will discover that reasonable adjustments for pregnant women are not new and that in 1788 Dorothy Jordan received accommodations such as being exempted from having to make two performances an evening from around the four month point and the “temporary suspension of particularly strenuous roles in her repertoire” (p. 168). Others negotiated breaks to nurse their infants on performance days. And while readers won’t find themselves journeying into the birthing chambers of all the women in this study, they will hear George Anne Bellamy’s account of her eleven-day labour, in 1749, which needed the interventions of an accoucheur or man-midwife and likely his forceps as Bellamy refers to a “forced birth” (p. 97). 

Phillips notes that the presence of pregnant actresses on stage marks a significant cultural moment as these women were the first “nonroyal, nonaristocratic, nonfamilial, working pregnant bodies to which a significant cross-section of the population had almost daily visual and/or print access” (p. 29). This is right because while this was an era in which most working-class women in all trades had long continued to work until the moment of delivery, meaning that sight was not new, the cross-section of London society who went to performances would include many for whom this was their first sustained encounter with the working female body in a public sphere. Seeing pregnant women in such high-profile roles displaying the latest fashions of pregnancy to an audience and to readers of popular publications would indeed be “utterly new” (p. 29). Carrying All Before Her brings out new insights into this cultural moment. As Phillips acknowledges, a challenge of the project “is the diversity of the embodied experience of pregnancy” and that it is “difficult to recapture a sense of exactly what a woman felt and looked like when pregnant, in every performance across her lifetime” (p. 117). While this is true, it is certainly the case that readers of Carrying All Before Her come away with a much better sense of how actresses incorporated their celebrity pregnancies into their careers than they would otherwise have had. This book is a most welcome addition to the cultural recovery of women’s lived experience in the long eighteenth century.

Sara Read

Sara Read is a Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is widely published in the area of early modern women’s reproductive health; she is also a novelist whose second novel – The Midwife’s Truth set in 1666 -has just been published. Sara is a member of the organising committee of the Women’s Studies Group. Her personal website is www.sararead.co.uk

Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman. By Tabitha Kenlon. London and New York: Anthem Press. 2020. pp. 218. £80 (hardback). ISBN: 9781785273148.

Tabitha Kenlon’s ambitious, witty and well-written monograph, Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman, examines six centuries of conduct books and etiquette guides designed for women. A chronological exploration, each chapter homes in on the most popular conduct books published each century, though, as readers will discover, publishers repeatedly reprinted the same conduct books regardless of whether the advice was decades or even centuries old. As such, mothers, grandmothers, and even great-grandmothers could be reading (and expected to conform to) the same written advice over a fifty to one-hundred-year period. Kenlon states that while moral, religious, and social expectations adapted and changed over the centuries, advice given to women on how she should behave, how she should dress, and what was considered appropriate feminine behaviour remained disturbingly constant. Kenlon even makes parallels between advice as found in conduct books and modern tropes as seen and read in sitcoms, movies, plays, and novels as a deliberate reminder that female stereotypes have been deeply ingrained in Western European culture since the Middle Ages.

In the very first chapter, which examines two conduct manuals from the fourteenth century, Kenlon explains that women were expected to embody two opposing traits: a wife was to be submissive to her husband when he was present, but to also take over his duties in his absence, including managing a household, educating children, and giving orders. In Kenlon’s words, these texts ask that a woman be ‘both strong and submissive, intelligent and biddable, capable and helpless’ (p. 16).

By the sixteenth century, conduct manuals dwelled on a woman’s appearance, advising her to avoid ostentatious dress and gossip, less she be branded vain and outspoken. In the seventeenth century, women were encouraged to adopt self-reflection and to self-police their own behaviour. Silence and modesty were upheld as ideal feminine traits and those who failed to conform to the ideal were ‘scolded’ both legally and socially. 

Until the eighteenth century, many writers justified their advice by referring to the Bible, and biblical stories. From the eighteenth century onwards, however, Kenlon shows that writers moved away from primarily religious justifications and instead focussed more on general morality. For centuries, girls and young women were advised to fix their attention on preparing for marriage and securing an acceptable husband. Once married, keeping her husband happy and having children was expected to sustain a woman until her dying breath. Of course, happiness is somewhat of a moving target. In previous centuries, submission and silence were the acceptable behaviours women needed to adopt, but in the eighteenth century, a husband desired a wife he could have a conversation with on different topics of interest. Of course, she could not be too outspoken or too controversial, but she should be able to converse enough that the couple developed companionship. As such, girls needed to be educated so they could engage in polite conversation. Kenlon’s description of eighteenth-century female education reminded me of the fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. If a young woman did not receive an ample education, she was too boring. If she appeared too educated, she may become too outspoken. Striking a balance was the key.

I found Kenlon’s final chapter on self-help guides and other advice writing for women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the most powerful but also the most disheartening. Many of these self-help guides repeat centuries-old advice: women should avoid being too loud, too brash, too outspoken, too sexy, too frigid, too put together, and too slovenly. Such advice is still very much part of present-day Western society.

Kenlon avoids discussing the LGBTQ+ perspective, even in her chapters on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I realise this may seem like a divergence for an already historically broad study, but it would be interesting to read Kenlon’s perspective on how advice writing speaks to the LGBTQ+ community. Indeed, a chapter that considers the LGBTQ+ perspective might make a nice addition if Kenlon were ever invited to produce a second edition of the book.

Overall, Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman was a thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking read and a must for any student or scholar exploring gender history. This book is also available as an e-book and an audio book and, as such, is one of the first academic publications to take advantage of the audio book format. This is a much-needed development in academic book publishing, given that it makes books more accessible to a wider audience. I hope Kenlon’s determination to make the text available in multiple formats is adopted by others in future.

Dr Brianna Robertson-Kirkland

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland/University of Glasgow