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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 549-552



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Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810. By Harriet Guest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. x + 350 pp.

Small Change is among the most ambitious and substantial of the recent wave of feminist works reassessing the public lives of eighteenth-century women writers. 1 With many of these works, Harriet Guest's study takes up the question of women's role in the late-eighteenth-century public sphere. A capacious, wide-ranging treatment of authors (from Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott to Anna Seward and Mary Wollstonecraft), Small Change focuses primarily on the shifting demands placed on intellectual women between midcentury and the early Regency. Guest's fondness of mapping ideological quandaries and cultural ambivalences in many ways is reminiscent of Claudia L. Johnson's work, although the sweep of Guest's narrative and the scope of her argument are broader. 2

Guest takes her title from two quotations by Elizabeth Hamilton and William Russell that serve as epigraphs for her introduction. Both compare women to cash on hand and thus as something at once inconsequential and yet essential to daily life:

Because eighteenth-century women are seen to be like small change in their virtues, their habits of mind, they enter into every area on which scholars gain a purchase. The analogy employed in my epigraphs links them to a quotidian, the immediate and the contingent, to the minutiae of private life. But it also indicates that gender difference is the basis of sociable exchange, that women are the "bond of company" which "one can never safely be without." Femininity may seem of small [End Page 549] significance in some of the major transactions of cultural change, but it is always a part of what gives those transactions current value. (2)

Such a position is, to say the least, complex, operating in Guest's introduction as a point of slippage between the poles that structure traditional Habermasian notions of public and private spheres. Yet Guest does not merely seek to complicate our understanding of the public and the private. In calling on us to place greater value on small changes—on the gradual, personal, contingent, and residual shifts that affect the lives of writers and cultures—she demands, in the most overarching sense, that we reconceive historical change and cultural relations. She isolates subtle ideological shifts in gender relations and reads them closely in context, tracking processes of social change and also continuities across decades. At its best her analysis stages a dialectic through which such stubborn attitudes clash with the contingencies that drive social change, and onto this shifting terrain Guest plots the responses of no fewer than a dozen women writers.

Small Change is divided into four sections. The first, "Learning and Shopping in the Mid-Eighteenth Century," seeks to explode the dualism of public and private by exploring mid-eighteenth-century anxieties over androgyny and commerce, particularly as they are represented in Sarah Fielding's David Simple and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall. In these novels, and in William Hogarth's domestic satires of the English elite, "notions of the public become peripheral, almost accidental to the private interests that are the motor of commercial progress," which renders "distinctions—between the social stations, between national identities, or between vice and virtue— . . . increasingly elusive" (30). This reading is buttressed by chapter 2's treatment of eighteenth-century memoirs of learned women and by chapter 3's exploration of representations of domestic economy and female commerce. Both present women writers as caught between shifting binaries, in which domestic space is at once individually private and exemplarily national and in which learned ladies are simultaneously ornaments of the British nation and troublingly public figures. In Guest's account, such intellectual activities take on new meaning in an increasingly commercial society, where visiting and shopping become more and more politicized and read as symptomatic of a culture uncertain over women's place and function.

The second section, "The Fame of Elizabeth Carter," introduces into Guest's discussion of public and...

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