Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender, and: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, and: The Appearance of Truth: The Story of Elizabeth Canning and Eighteenth-Century Narrative, and: A Life of Propriety: Anne Murray Powell and Her Family, 1755-1849, and: Spiritual Pilgrim: A Reassessment of the Life and Times of the Countess of Huntingdon (review)

Virginia Woolf’s challenge to women to “rewrite” history has been energetically met since the mid- and late-1960s. Linda Gordon, Carol Smith-Rosenberg, and Joan Scott, among others, have insisted on reexamining “what counts as evidence” and thus “what counts as history”; on learning to locate and listen to ordinary women’s voices, particularly in private papers; and on seeing women’s history as a radical resituating of the field of history, both because it reveals the inadequacy of what has been called history and because it requires that history include and make visible the tensions between different experiencing subjects. All of the books here under review make contributions to women’s history.

On the view that it is the domestic scene, the details of family life, and women’s relations with women that historians must search in order to write women’s history, Katherine M. J. McKenna deliberately defines her project as a biography of a woman who made no particular mark of public life, and thus, in one stroke, accommodates three important principles: women’s history has been a largely omitted history; if women’s history is to be re- or discovered, the ideological divide between public and private life must lose its defining force for historians; on account of their gendered roles, women’s experience of social structures and private and public events has been different from that of men. McKenna’s central commitment to make history out of previously excluded areas of experience is carried out and embodied by her organizational scheme. She begins with a narrative of the life of Anne Murray, whose marriage to William Drummer Powell (like her, from a Loyalist family) was followed by a series of resettlements (mostly in Canada), nine children, and finally an established position among the elite of York (now Toronto). After the chronological narrative, McKenna uses two major categories crafted to tell the story of women: 1) “Intersections of Male and Female Gender Roles: Married Life; Brothers; Sons” and 2) “Transmission of Female Gender Roles: Education; Marriage and Childbirth; Limitations of a Woman’s Sphere.” Throughout the study, McKenna makes available extended unpublished material from various document collections and presents with great skill the voices of three generations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women. Both this material and the sources to which it points will be an invaluable resource to its readers.

In centralizing women’s domestic and social lives, McKenna’s study supplies a facing page for history. Further, she not only makes a persuasive, cumulative case for the necessity of writing women’s history, she also provides a model for doing it. Despite its benefits, however, McKenna’s organizational pattern accounts for one of the problems with her study. She often withholds (for a later thematic section) information that might significantly alter the reader’s analysis. Thus, for example, a relationship discussed in Education or Marriage and Childbirth has a quite different character from the same relationship analyzed in Limitations of a Woman’s Sphere. As a result, an important element of synthesis is left to the reader. A related and more important weakness is that McKenna deploys her analytic framework...