Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867 (review)

Although recovering forgotten women writers has always been a priority for feminist scholarship, the aristocratic women who dotted the nineteenth-century literary marketplace have often proven difficult to reclaim. With the exception of such figures as Caroline Norton or Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), aristocratic women writers usually find themselves relegated to the dustbin kept especially for ephemeral celebrities. In Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832–1867, Muireann O'Cinneide admits immediately that aristocratic women resist easy incorporation into feminist narratives. Although scholars have sought to reclaim aristocratic women from the "lurking sense that women who wear expensive dresses can have no serious role in Victorian narratives of nationhood and identity" (5), O'Cinneide warns that to make expansive claims for their sociopolitical power "is as ideologically and factually questionable as a sweeping dismissal of their importance" (6). O'Cinneide instead argues that we need to develop more flexible models about how gender, class, and politics interacted during the mid-Victorian period. Aristocratic women writers prove especially useful for such theorizing because they were simultaneously privileged society figures and regarded as literary and political dilettantes.

Historians such as Elaine Chalus and K. D. Reynolds have already studied how aristocratic women directly engaged in political activities, whether engaging in public advocacy or behind-the-scenes networking. O'Cinneide, however, operates with a looser understanding of the political, which "involves the articulation or debate of communal values, and the interaction between groups aiming to further their own interests, rather than the achievement of specific measures" (21). Thus, O'Cinneide's political broad church incorporates all texts that foreground the endless negotiations over who may represent the nation, and who must be firmly repelled from the nation's borders. Such political activity, however, takes place within the textual territory of the "literary nation," which O'Cinneide models after Benedict Anderson's influential Imagined Communities (1983); this nation is simultaneously the "imagined nation as represented in literature" and "the nation itself as shaped by literature" (13). In this reading, even apparently frivolous novels may well constitute a serious critique of mid-Victorian national culture. To shape and refine this literary nation, the aristocratic woman novelist reworks the forms of unofficial political intervention readily available to her, whether using them to establish herself as a literary professional or to self-reflexively comment on both ideal and corrupt practices of aristocratic leadership. Her politics may be liberal or even radical, but they depend on preexisting networks of social privilege for their articulation.

O'Cinneide divides the book into two parts: first, an assessment of aristocratic women's writing in multiple prose genres—including autobiography (nonfictional and otherwise) and silver-fork fiction—and second, case studies of the lives and careers of two of the Victorian era's most notorious aristocratic women, Norton and Rosina Bulwer Lytton. In both parts, her readings tease out the particular role of Society—the capitalized, exclusive realm of aristocratic high society—in articulating national goals and anxieties. And both conclude that aristocratic women writers eventually had to undo any strict identification of themselves and their work with their social rank, lest it undermine their ability to hold an audience. The question of professionalism, however, remained a stumbling block. Thus, in the second chapter, on silver-fork fiction, O'Cinneide points out that "the closer writers appear to be to the world they describe, the easier it is to dismiss them as merely channelling direct personal experience into frivolously unimportant novels" (54). O'Cinneide sees in the silver-fork novel—a genre often denounced, even by modern critics, as hopelessly lightweight—an attempt by aristocratic novelists to claim the mantle of "moral reform" (59). That is, the aristocratic woman writer positions her fictional accounts of scandalous social shockers as a benevolent intervention in the evils of modern culture, challenging aristocratic society's corruption in order to redeem it for national leadership. Nevertheless, O'Cinneide suggests, this authorial strategy failed...