Women Novelists Before Jane Austen: The Critics and Their Canons (review)

Brian Corman has written a lucid and compelling historiography of canon formation, focusing on the exclusion of women writers from traditional histories of the English novel. He starts in the eighteenth century with "Richardson and Fielding's demonization of pre-1740 prose fiction," and concludes with Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957), taking in along the way commentators such as Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821), the master of Tonbridge School, Sidney Lanier (1842–81), George Saintsbury (1845–1933), J.B. Priestly (1894–1984), and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. By using this inclusive perspective and considering the writings of journalists and professional reviewers as well as those of well-known literary critics and academics such as F.R. Leavis, Arnold Kettle, and Émile Legouis, Corman's work successfully highlights the ways in which once-popular authors of both sexes are rendered invisible, and he convincingly charts the changing evaluations of early women novelists before Jane Austen.

The book opens with an analysis of eighteenth-century representations of the nature of fiction and the distinctions between romances and novels. Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance (1785) places the novel within the widest possible construction of prose fiction. She identifies Aphra Behn as being the first of the English novel writers, but then rejects the fictions of Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delarivier Manley as improper and licentious, a dismissal from history that is repeated often by subsequent critics. The remaining chapters cover reviews, criticism, and histories of the novel in forty-year blocks. In the 1840–80 section, criticism of Julia Kavanagh, for example, foregrounds the "didactic responsibility of the novelist," arguing that "novels have a double character—they reflect an age, and they influence. They are a mirror and a model" (79). In the 1880–1920 section, Corman looks at academic critics such as Walter Raleigh, who began writing histories of the novel. Raleigh placed its origins not in romance fiction but in genres such as life writing and essays, invoking Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift as preparing the ground for Samuel Richardson; he identifies Pamela as the first "modern" English novel. In the final section, 1920–57, Corman takes an extended look at Ernest Baker's The History of the English Novel (1924–39), with its theory of the evolution of prose fiction that corresponds with cycles of "decadence." Baker acknowledges that there was "a regular school" of early women novelists after Behn, but he views their primary function as providing a necessary mass of new novels, although of poor quality, that accustomed the new reading audience to novel reading and prepared the way for the great writers of the nineteenth century.

In this final section, we also encounter the histories of the novel that many of us read while in graduate school. In Corman's opinion, Allan McKillop and Ian Watt "represent the nadir of the critical fortunes of women novelists before Austen" (254). Through their championing of Richardson, however, and drawing attention to the female protagonists of the novels of Defoe, he argues, they effectively paved the way for a feminist "revival" of the works of Behn and other formerly disreputable women writers such as Manley and Haywood (254).

Unlike some other studies of early women novelists, Corman places the women writers in the context of critics' assessments of their male contemporaries and the critical principles that are applied to both. He finds a remarkable consistency in the narratives told about the formation and development of the English novel, a critical voice that he characterizes as being fundamentally conservative. Corman describes his own narrative as "based on an examination of as many 'historical' accounts of the 'novel,' both in terms generously defined, as I could find" (4). This massive collection of primary documents permits Corman to make convincing arguments about what stays constant in the construction of the canon of the novel...