Acting Like a Lady: British Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Theater (review)

Readers purchasing Nora Nachumi’s Acting Like a Lady who expect a long and meaty read about the influence of the theatre on eighteenth-century women novelists may be disappointed. Nearly half of the book’s length is devoted to an appendix listing alphabetically “382 female novelists who published novels between 1660 and 1818,” roughly one-third of whom “were playwrights, performers, or otherwise associated with the eighteenth-century stage” (181). So why are the other 247 writers included in a book that purports to examine “the impact of the theater and ideas about the theater on the novels’ representations of the feminine ideal” (xvii)? The dust jacket of the volume insists: “Especially valuable to scholars is the appendix” and “Acting Like a Lady envisions these women [novelists] as participants in a critical conversation about female nature and performance that continues today.” Yet, because of the exhaustive appendix, Acting Like a Lady has room to examine only three of the 135 women novelists with theatrical backgrounds: Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen. While many of Nachumi’s observations about these three are compelling, the small size of her sample does not allow her to do what she proposes in her prologue, which is to identify and investigate “a source of female literary agency that has not been thoroughly explored, either by theater historians or by literary scholars working on the representation of gender in novels” (xvii–xviii). Nachumi is correct in her assertion that most studies of early women writers compartmentalize and treat either the theatre or the novel without fully considering the impact of the former on the latter. Her slim 177 pages on the topic is only a start to remedying this difficulty.

Part 1 (which includes chapter 1, “The Theatrical Woman and the Feminine Ideal,” and chapter 2, “The Lady and the Novelist: Paragon and Performer”) draws on eighteenth-century conduct literature to argue that female performers and playwrights, due both to their public personas and acting/dissembling, necessarily threatened a feminine ideal that focused on modesty, privacy, and transparency. When such performers and playwrights tried their hand at the novel, the dissonance between their two roles had itself to be reconciled by theatricality. Since, by mid-century, “most women novelists were aligning their work with that of conduct-book writers” in order to attain respectable “didactic authority,” the “prefaces by British women novelists influenced by the stage appear to be a kind of theatrical performance, one that invested their authors with the authority to define what a ‘real’ lady should be” (xix). Although she makes a valuable point here, Nachumi spends too much time in part 1 retracing the steps of earlier scholars. She proves that “acting in a theatrical sense” could not be reconciled to “acting like a lady” (7), a point sufficiently established by critics such as Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984); Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects (1992); Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica (1989); and Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty (1984). Few would contest Nachumi’s point that “throughout the century” actresses “embodied different and more complex pictures of female nature than that represented by conduct material ... In short, the possibility that ladies were no different from actresses threatened an ideological system that equated the lady’s appearance with her quality of mind” (11–12). Nachumi painstakingly traces the ways in which “the female dramatist ... had to find ways to balance the assertive behavior necessary to a playwright with the modest conduct of the middle-class lady” (34) and the ways in which “the self-representations of many women novelists” became “a kind of theatrical performance, one that naturalizes the writer’s apparent resemblance to contemporary images of the feminine ideal” (47). The mid-century demand for increasing female decorum in women’s writing was documented as early as 1986 by Jane Spencer in The...