The English Novel in History, 1700-1780 (review)

Reviews John Richetti. The English Novel in History, 1700-1780. The Novel in History . New York: Routledge, 1999. ? + 290pp. US$85.00 (cloth); US$25.99 (paper). ISBN 0-415-19030-4. This book is the fourth and latest addition to a series, The Novel in History, edited by Gillian Beer and designed to place British fiction in its political, social, and broadly cultural contexts. A worthy addition it is. In many articles and several books, most notably PopularFiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 17001739 (1969), John Richetti has for years been favouring his fellow students ofthe early English novel with astute commentary and seminal insights. His newest book is the most sweeping and comprehensive effortofhis long and distinguished career. Instead of treatingjust a few decades, or a single author (as in Defoe 's Narratives: Situations and Structures, 1975), it covers the better part of an entire century. And instead of focusing (as critics have typically done, including Richetti himself in much of his earlier work) on principles of selective discussion "according to various standards of narrative quality or thematic continuity," it studies "a wider sample of texts" in response to its author's interest in "that broadest of themes, social change and social representation" (p. 16). "The eighteenth-century British novel," says Richetti on his very first page, "is a unique set of documents by which we can try to hear voices that speak something very like our language." But we must read those documents with an informed historical understanding if the voices that speak from them are to be heard distinctly and accurately. Richetti leads us admirably towards such understanding, and in a manner that will appeal to and enlighten not just specialists in his subject, but also a more general audience of knowing readers. Specialists will particularly appreciate his eclectic drawing together of the work of previous critics, theorists, and cultural historians (Habermas, Bakhtin, Eagleton, Colin Campbell, Alasdair Maclntyre, and others) into a synthesis that provides a useful background for his carefully controlled approach; all readers will profit from the range and detail of his consistently fine considerations of writers and texts. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 13, Number 1, October 2000 78 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 In closing his introductory chapter, which fully lays out the aims only glanced at above, Richetti notes that most accounts of early fiction "follow its lead in focusing on the individuals whom it renders." His own purpose varies from this, as he attempts to see "how individuality itself is the issue, how individuals and their social surroundings are in a reciprocal process of re-definition and development" (p. 16). In seven additional chapters he pursues this purpose with admirable clarity of focus while never falling into schematic rigidity. His second chapter, "Amatory Fiction: Behn, Manley, Haywood," places the three novelists—the famed (and scandalous) "Triumvirate ofWit"—squarely in a historical context that denied women access to the heights of literary acclaim but also witnessed their success in the literary marketplace, where they transformed the "ethos of love and honor" (p. 19) that supported romance tradition, turning attention towards the interior experience of the private character in a way that would forever alter the English practice of writing fiction. In the new amatory novels of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, the individual is located in relation to a shifting circumstantial reality (rarely rendered with any particularity, by the way, with the important exception of Manley's New Atalantis) that actually serves as an "impediment " to "immediate and spontaneous attraction" (p. 19) between characters, while also depriving them of stable frames of emotional, psychological, and moral reference. They typically feel the attraction anyway, and the result is a troubled defiance of cultural norms coupled with a failure—especially among the women of these novels—to find fulfilment in their transgressive behaviour. But the norms themselves lack certainty, including the norms of marriage and sexual propriety; and even the conventional language of literary expression—Richetti designates it "male" language—becomes suspect as both inauthentic and alien to women's experience . In the face of such circumstances, women novelists almost inevitably adopted a "natural" language that, despite its inadequacy to the emotional and...