Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (review)

This wide-ranging and scrupulous book explores a neglected and fascinating subject: the late careers of "the first mass of published women writers who survived to advanced age" (1-2), including Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Jane Porter. When Virginia Woolf suggests that "Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney," she overlooks Burney's outliving Austen by more than twenty years, even though Austen was only three years old when Evelina was published. Many women writers we think of as belonging to the eighteenth century or the Romantic era survived well into the nineteenth century, and many continued writing in their later years, yet their works from that period tend to be disregarded or dismissed. Sometimes it is even (wrongly) claimed that they stopped writing altogether, or "just" produced critical editions of other people's works (an assumption made about Barbauld, for example).

Women who continued writing as they aged encountered various forms of hostility, misunderstanding, or misrepresentation. Novelists in particular might be attacked, as Burney was by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly, for displaying an age-inappropriate interest in tales of love. Croker sees both book and author as not only enfeebled by age but as sexually grotesque: The Wanderer is "Evelina grown old," Burney "an old coquette author who endeavours, by the wild tawdriness and gaiety of her attire, to compensate for the loss of her natural charms of freshness, novelty and youth" (38). Aging female authors could also be accused of garrulity, as Burney was in reviews of The Wanderer; Looser sees Maria Edgeworth as carefully distancing herself from this quality in her own last novel, Helen. Hester Piozzi, by contrast, self-mockingly embraced the stereotype of garrulous old woman in her later works; she even subtitled one late work "A Grandame's Garrulity," though she failed to find a publisher for it. Discussing how Piozzi was stigmatized for her close relationship in old age with a young actor, William Augustus Conway, Looser suggests that this relationship might have been prompted by Piozzi's desire to secure a "reading public" for her works. An idealization of "good" female old age could also create distortions, as Looser argues it does in the case of Barbauld, whose later years are often (mis)read as reflecting the serene conclusion of her poem "Life" (a work that Wordsworth confessed he wished he had written).

Aging women writers adopted a range of strategies to cope with the prejudices they faced. In an unpublished letter that has come to light comparatively recently, Catherine Macaulay attacks unfavourable reviews of her Letters on Education, accusing the reviewers of lacking chivalry to her age and sex, and claiming the right to sympathetic treatment for her infirmities. As Looser notes, it is hard to know what degree of irony is at work when Macaulay demands compassion for her "waning laurels" (51), and the strategy clearly failed: the Monthly Review did not publish Macaulay's letter, nor did it commission the new review she had demanded. In different ways, Barbauld and Jane Porter also sought to control their works' reception and reputation. Barbauld's editing of others' works, Looser suggests, provided a model of how she hoped her own works would be treated. Porter not only sought to cash in on her works by repeated attempts to gain a royal pension in recognition of her literary achievements, but she also used the opportunity of republishing earlier works in Bentley's Standard Novels series. By this means she created a new copyright as well as framing her works for future reception. Despite Porter's efforts, she became paradoxically best known in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries for being forgotten, though the recent Broadview Press edition of The Scottish Chiefs suggests a happier ending to her story.

Looser's conclusion offers some provocative reflections on how to rethink dominant literary...