Tag: book review

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

Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe by Mary D. Garrard. London: Reaktion Books. 2020. Pp. 320. £15.95 (hardback), ISBN 9781789142020.

Artemisia Gentileschi is an artist whose time has more than come. New acquisitions of her work continue to emerge with great fanfare into the gallery spaces of the world’s most august art institutions, the most recent being the Getty Museum’s acquisition of her Lucretia (1627). In 2020, London’s National Gallery built an important show around the acquisition of Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as Catherine of Alexandria (1615–17). Gentileschi’s paintings are reentering a world in which not nearly enough has changed for women since the time when she was painting her original visions. In a climate of feminist protest, in which women’s voices are rightly loud and insistent, Gentileschi’s work retains a force of resonance, a relevance, that renders it as compelling and urgent as ever it was.

Not least, the parallel between Gentileschi’s experience of taking a rape complaint to trial and the experiences of women today who enter a courtroom in the hope of obtaining justice is painfully obvious. It is by now impossible to approach Gentileschi’s oeuvre without knowledge of this crime against her, and of the horror of her trial. The MeToo movement has highlighted how common it is for women to experience the crime of sexual assault and how rarely such crimes are punished. Society continues to accommodate systemic violence against women and girls. The crime of rape, then, is apposite to women’s reception of her work at this contemporary moment. It cannot be evacuated from Gentileschi’s history as an artist without enacting a distortion.

Yet too often, Gentileschi’s works of art have been framed as materially indexical to her rape, as symptoms arising from a private trauma. At their worst, such framings figure Gentileschi’s artistic agency as secondary to that of her abusers, whose actions not only “author” her works but provide their natural interpretive framework. Clearly, there is a balance to be struck between telling the whole of the important story of this female artist and allowing the undoubted quality and originality of her work to stand on its own terms. This can only take place outside of the tired psychobiographical framework that serves only to suppress Gentileschi’s painterly originality within a reductive teleological narrative of victimhood.

Eminent scholar, founding member of the field of feminist art history and pioneer of Artemisia Gentileschi studies, Mary D. Garrard is perhaps uniquely equipped to plot a course through these rocky waters. If, as Garrard argues, the repetition and magnification of artists and their work is a central strategy for canon formation, then Garrard is rightly feted for having been responsible for some of the most effective and transformative repetition and magnification of women’s art in the discipline of art history. Her new book represents a new and full account of Artemisia Gentileschi’s life and work. There are seven chapters, organised around recurring and important themes in Gentileschi’s work. This structure facilitates an interrogation of the contemporary visual and literary context illuminating these pictures and their subjects – their Judiths, Susannas, Lucretias, musicians, saints and allegorical figurations.

Garrard’s strategy of situating Gentileschi’s paintings within the contemporary writing and patronage of women avoids the shallows, contextualising the paintings within a broad and lively field of female authorship, creativity and crucially, feminism avant-la-lettre. This does not render the emotion in Gentileschi’s paintings insubstantial, but rather rebalances it against a feminist intellectual ballast, recuperating this extraordinary artist’s richness and range. It reframes Gentileschi’s work as a deliberate intervention in public debate.

Garrard’s book establishes Gentileschi very firmly as a player within the artistic and intellectual networks spanning Europe’s great courts and cities. This is really fascinating stuff, which, moreover, serves to situate Gentileschi’s art within a transterritorial conversation, as visual currency circulating within an intellectual exchange, that both draws on and responds emphatically to contemporary discourses. Moreover, Garrard demonstrates how Gentileschi’s paintings intervened in the flourishing feminist debates then known as the querelles des femmes, resituating her oeuvre within a lively community of early modern women who thought, knew, spoke, wrote, performed and painted. Intriguingly, Garrard argues that Gentileschi’s painting visualises this community of women as one which crosses class lines. Garrard extends this idea beautifully throughout, showing how Gentileschi’s work too spans historical time, forming a rallying point for the entry of new members into this feminist community persevering into our own present day.

While acknowledging the dangers of the biographical fallacy, Garrard makes a good case for reading Gentileschi’s pictures with her biography in mind. She argues convincingly for the painter’s use of her own likeness in her paintings, a matter of some recent debate. Garrard’s love for her subject is apparent, certainly no bad thing, and her connoisseurial, but also heartfelt, engagement with her subject produces a rich intimacy in her treatment of the artist’s history. Garrard’s use of the painter’s first name throughout is indicative of this intimacy, which feels very genuine, even ethical, as the evident product of so many years of patient study (I don’t claim the same privilege for myself here, although Garrard’s point about the status of Gentileschi’s celebrity, her name brand recognition, is well made). Accordingly, Garrard works hard to centre the originality of Gentileschi’s style, of her painterly voice, and points to several areas fertile for new research, not least, early modern women’s feminist patronage of women artists.

This intimacy extends into Garrard’s formal discussions of Gentileschi’s paintings, their remarkably palpable women, livid with corporeality, their straining hands, solid forearms and locked elbows, their stolid calm in the face of blood and danger. Gentileschi’s painting of women psychologically and physically absorbed in the back-breaking work of political murder, their total commitment to assassination, retains the power to arrest the gaze. Both Gentileschi and Garrard debunk the cherished myth that women of early modern Europe were all as modest and submissive as the conduct literature of their own day and an art historiography rooted in the nineteenth century would have them be.

The book’s approach stands on it own in quite a busy field. Much is being published on Artemisia Gentileschi right now, but nothing quite like this. The book is written in an engaging and conversational style appealing to a generalist audience, but there is plenty here for specialists to value. As standard with Reaktion Books, there are lovely endpapers and a cloth cover, and many high quality colour reproductions. There is a useful bibliography. A small caveat: I would have liked more information in the image captions, where the dimensions of paintings and their locations are not usually listed; it’s important for us to know the scale at which Gentileschi worked.

Dr Sara Ayres

Affiliate Researcher

Centre for Privacy Studies at Copenhagen University

Book Review: The Gossips’ Choice. By Sara Read. Wild Pressed Books. 2020. Pp 296. £12 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-916-4896-8-4. Reviewed by Rebecca Simpson

‘That’s the thing, mother. The journals got me thinking. I know you use them to help you teach. But think how many more midwives would learn from you if we made them fit for printing. I’ve published several guides to women’s health, but nothing like this, and you’d be writing from life, not other books. Think about it, mother: you’d be the first English woman to write a midwifery guide. It could make your fortune!’ (p.82)

Lucie Smith, the protagonist of Sara Read’s debut novel, chooses not to listen to the urging of her son, Simon, and retains her extensive journals for her personal private use. The journals, which comprise of detailed notes on cases from thirty years of midwifery practice, are a document of women’s secrets, and their author chooses to keep them from the eyes of the public. As Lucie herself remarks, few midwives in the seventeenth century would have either the inclination, or the literacy, to keep such detailed and valuable notes. It is unsurprising then, that many of Lucie’s remedies, and the advice she gives to her patients, are drawn from the work of Jane Sharp, who in 1671 actually became the first English woman to publish a midwifery guide, The Midwives Book: Or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered.

Lucie Smith’s story begins in a bedchamber at Calstone Manor, where she has just safely delivered a young woman of her first child. Privately, Lucie believes that the new mother, sixteen-year old Lady Eleanor Calstone, is too young to be having children, and disapproves that the aristocratic Calstones have hired an expensive London doctor to oversee the delivery. It is clear that the circumstances of the opening chapter are not typical of Lucie’s practice – she is more familiar with delivering the babies of the wives of farmers, weavers and local aldermen, and she is certainly unused to the presence of men in the birth chamber. However, Lucie takes seriously her oath as a midwife to not turn away a patient, and throughout the novel attends to the needs of labouring women, no matter their class, occupation, or circumstances.

The Gossips’ Choice depicts Lucie’s day-to-day existence as the most respected and in-demand midwife for the market-town of Tupingham, and surrounding area. Much of the novel is occupied with individual cases drawn from the works of Jane Sharp, and the eighteenth-century midwife Sarah Stone, who also published a midwifery guide. Should Lucie have followed her son’s urgings and published her own journals, we might have expected them to resemble Stone’s A Complete Practice of Midwifery (1737), which consists chiefly of annotated case studies, much like those Lucie uses to train her apprentice, Mary. Like Stone, Lucie Smith is married to an apothecary and is frequently called to intervene when less accomplished midwives, like the unlicensed hand-woman Mother Henshaw, risk losing their patients through malpractice. It is in the description of these many deliveries that Read’s extensive knowledge of birthing practices, and the lives of women in the seventeenth century, shine most strongly.

A number of separate storylines interweave throughout the novel, including: the fractious relationship between Lucie’s husband and their son Simon, a printer living in London; the ongoing rivalry between Lucie and Mother Henshaw; a clandestine relationship between the Smith’s maid Martha and a local widower; and finally the repercussions of a tragedy that occurs in one of Lucie’s cases. Although the events of The Gossips’ Choice are fictitious, the novel is richly informed by Read’s extensive work in the field of seventeenth-century medicine and reproduction. Here, she has skilfully blended anecdotes and cases drawn from the real work of early modern midwives, with an engaging story that explores the experiences of women across several social classes and stages of life. At times the novel feels slightly imbalanced between the narratives of Lucie’s cases, and the overarching plotlines which are concentrated largely in the second half. This does have an effect on the novel’s pacing, and its conclusion appears somewhat suddenly. However, Lucie Smith is a wonderfully rounded character whose expertise and authority shine through the text, and her charisma buoys forward the narrative.

Post-Restoration tensions in England are demonstrated through the interwoven connections between the Smith and Calstone families. The Calstones are newly elevated to the aristocracy for their support of Charles II, whereas the local townsfolk of Tupingham, and the Smith family in particular, are Parliamentary sympathisers and secretly hope for a return to the days of the Protectorate. These ideological differences are set against the friendships that develop between Lucie and Simon with various members of the wider Calstone family, and are complicated by the pervading presence of the conflict’s aftermath: in the wounded war veterans that linger on the edge of both the town and the narrative, and in Martha’s pervading spinsterhood – her fiancé having been killed fighting Prince Rupert’s army. The novel is also set against the events of the Great Plague of 1665, and the themes of quarantine, contagion, and the fear of disease are especially topical and poignant given its publication in May 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Gossips’ Choice largely avoids the debates surrounding man-midwifery that dominate eighteenth-century discussions of midwifery and women’s healthcare. Aside from the appearance of the arrogant London doctor in the first chapter, the pregnant women in Tupingham are all attended to by other women, save for the occasional appearance of a male surgeon. As readers we are invited into a world in which pregnancy and birth are the exclusive domain of women, and Lucie works hard to maintain ‘the female-only space that was proper’ (p.10). Indeed, it is the ritualistic aspects of childbirth, including the gossips (female friends invited to be present at a birth) that give the novel its title, as Lucie’s extensive knowledge and successful record in delivering babies makes her the first-choice midwife of the local gossips.

Read has also written a companion pamphlet, A Handy Guide to Pregnancy and Birth for the Seventeenth-century Woman, also by Wild Pressed Books (full details below), which serves as a primer for the medical world of The Gossips’ Choice. Also drawn largely from Jane Sharp’s work, the guide modernises much of the antiquated language of Sharp’s book, and serves as a sort of introduction to the knowledge seventeenth-century gossips might acquire from their own tenure as birth attendants and mothers.

Handy Guide to Pregnancy and Birth for the Seventeenth-century Woman by Sara Read

Framed as a tool for the unfortunate time traveller (the back cover tells us that this guide will tell you all you need to know ‘should you find yourself unexpectedly in the seventeenth century’) the guide is a light-hearted pastiche of the slew of pregnancy books available to modern readers. With sections detailing how to tell if you are pregnant, how to determine whether infertility is the fault of husband or wife, instructions for antenatal care, and an explanation of the ritual of ‘churching’, A Handy Guide to Pregnancy and Birth for the Seventeenth-century Woman unveils some of the secrets of womanhood that Lucie Smith wished so desperately to keep from the press.

The attention to detail in both A Handy Guide to Pregnancy and Birth for the Seventeenth-century Woman, and The Gossips’ Choice, will delight any readers familiar with the medical world of seventeenth-century women, whilst also offering an excellent and accessible introduction for newcomers and popular readership.

Rebecca Simpson

University of York

Rebecca is a PhD student at the University of York. Her research explores representations of pregnancy and birth in the literature and medicine of the long-eighteenth century, and she is particularly interested in the literary output of midwives and female medical practitioners.

*Disclosure: Sara Read is a member of the Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837.

The Gossips’ Choice and the Handy Guide are available from Wild Pressed Books.

A Handy Guide to Pregnancy and Birth for the Seventeenth-century Woman. By Sara Read. Wild Pressed Books. 2019. Pp 17. £4.50 (pamphlet)

Review of A Georgian Heroine: The Intriguing Life of Rachel Charlotte William Biggs, by Joanne Major and Sarah Murden (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2017) ISBN: 9781473863460 £19.99

On a Friday in 1987, the antiquarian book dealer John Byrne was making his way home from work when he was mugged in a street in Pimlico. The thief made off with his briefcase, a loss made all the more pertinent thanks to a rare eighteenth-century manuscript, lent to Byrne by his colleague Marius Kociejowski. A week later, the police contacted the pair to say the discarded case had been recovered and that the contents were, unfortunately, torn to shreds. When the fragments were returned, however, the manuscript was miraculously intact, possessed of a potency that had ensured its survival across time:

It was wet but in a single piece, and such was the quality of the handmade paper and the iron-based ink that once the sheets were dried out there was hardly any damage at all. (p. xxii)

The manuscript had been discovered in a cupboard by Kociejowski in a moment of serendipity, the extraordinary significance of which would later reveal itself. It was ‘stitched together to make a small booklet of twenty-eight quarto pages (three of them blank) and a covering letter of sixteen octavo pages, dated 26 February 1821, and signed “Charlotte B —”’ (p. xx). This was, it transpired, an autobiographical memoir written by Rachel Charlotte Williams Biggs, known as Charlotte and, at the time of composition, an elderly woman recalling her first love who, decades earlier, had abandoned her in search of riches in India. The intended recipient of the letter was none other than Sir David Ochterlony (1758–1825), who rose to the role of British Resident to the Moghul court in Delhi at the end of the Georgian period. More remarkable than this was that Kociejowski was a direct descendent of Ochterlony. In his preface to A Georgian Heroine, Kociejowski recalls how ‘the effect it made on me was absolutely electrifying […] it was as if the post had arrived over a century and a half late’ (p. xxi). What follows is a lively and richly detailed account of Charlotte’s life, drawn from her surviving writing by biographers and genealogists Joanne Major and Sarah Murden. Major and Murden are regular co-authors and as well as several published biographies maintain the wonderfully vivid and panoramic blog All Things Georgian. Here, through impressive archival work, they have pieced together the previously unknown life of an extraordinary Georgian woman.

Charlotte’s story begins on the shores of the Thames in 1770s Lambeth where she was courted by Ochterlony as a young girl. In the first in a series of calamitous twists, Ochterlony set out for India to earn his fortune only to find himself unable to return to England and instead forced to join the East India Company’s army. With Ochterlony in no position to support her, Charlotte was left alone in London and it is here that her account, transformed into lively prose by Major and Murden, takes off. Enter the villainous Richard Heaviside (a name ‘worthy of a Restoration comedy’) as an obsessive and dangerous young man whose crimes Major and Murden go on to document. Heaviside was the illegitimate son of a timber merchant, whose business and fortune he inherited in 1775. A regular visitor to Covent Garden, he soon became acquainted with all that neighbourhood had to offer. He nursed a growing obsession with Charlotte (whose family he knew well), ‘one that would lead to her downfall and destroy all her youthful hopes’ (p. 4).

Major and Murden’s presentation of Charlotte in this period as a passive, naive young woman who would eventually become a victim of abduction and rape at the hands of Heaviside (‘Charlotte’s unobtainability only heightened her desirability and Heaviside’s need to possess her’ p. 5) makes for difficult reading by a modern audience versed in the necessity and resonances of the #MeToo movement. There is no warning ahead of a chapter describing the rape itself, followed somewhat incongruously by a chapter not on Charlotte but on the early life of her rapist. Charlotte’s biographers do, however, offer early glimpses into the ingenuity and self-reliance that would perhaps characterise and preserve her in the years following her imprisonment at the hands of her tormentor. Requesting books, needle and thread from her captor in a bid to appear compliant, Charlotte used the tools to stitch together a secret message which, delivered to a neighbour by a visiting apothecary, secured her eventual rescue by a peripheral character in her story, Benjamin Hunt Briggs.

Charlotte fled to France with Briggs, to whom she may have been married, only to find herself once again imprisoned in the French Revolution. Eventually returning to England, Charlotte had become politicised enough to write a pamphlet A Maximum; or, the Rise and Progress of Famine, addressed to the British People, which William Wilberforce cited in parliament, crediting it to ‘a gentleman.’ She would go on to rise in Georgian society, organise the jubilee celebrations for George III and return to continental Europe, possibly as a spy, raising interesting questions about the agency and opportunities open to a woman subjected to such brutality.

Comparisons between the early events of Charlotte’s life, drawn directly from her unpublished manuscript, and the novels of Samuel Richardson are inevitable. Her writing, Major and Murden tell us, is peppered with references to her favourite poets and novelists, suggesting a self-conscious mode of composition that leads them to question the validity of the events she describes. This brings its own complications for modern readers, particularly considering the centring of sexually violent content alongside contemporary, vital calls to believe women. Repeated references made by Kociejowski as well as Major and Murden to Ochterlony having ‘gone native’ in Nepal as well as the frequent usage of ‘whore’ to signify sex workers invite further scrutiny, particular in the context of a narrative shaped by systemic injustice and disempowerment.

Although A Georgian Heroine might have benefitted from deeper engagement with Charlotte’s own words, the result is an account of the suffering and triumphs of a life lived during a turbulent period of British history in which it was supremely difficult, and regularly dangerous, to be a thinking and writing woman. Major and Murden form a compelling portrait of the previously elusive Charlotte, offering up a meaningful contribution to the ongoing feminist project of recovery. Interestingly, no visual portrait of Charlotte survives and indeed in his introduction, Kociejowski wishes that one might be found in the aftermath of the book’s publication. Certainly, Charlotte commissioned at least one miniature portrait during her lifetime, which she enclosed in an earlier letter to Ochterlony, writing with it:

it will therefore … be very pleasing to me to know you possess an object which may remind you of me when I am not more, and if as Gray says “even in our Ashes live their wonted fires” my spirit will be soothed should it be conscious that I am not entirely forgotten (p. xxv).

But, as A Georgian Heroine testifies, it was her words, committed to an explosive manuscript, that would outlive Rachel Charlotte Williams Biggs and ensure the survival of her legacy. In their hands, the emotive and affective power of her manuscript is revealed by Major and Murden, who demonstrate the myriad ways women’s life writing can offer new perspectives on the past.

Madeleine Pelling
University of Manchester

Madeleine is a postdoctoral fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on material and visual culture in the eighteenth century, and appears in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Women’s History Review and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is currently writing a monograph on the Duchess of Portland’s museum.

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

This book is available from Pen and Sword.

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)