Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (review)

REVIEWS 119 April London. Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ix + 262pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-65013-5. This absorbing and at times provocative study is valuable in itself and indicates significant new directions for future work. April London assumes that eighteenthcentury political theory provides two contrasting understandings of property: that of civic humanism, whereby the possession of land secures virtue; and that of bourgeois individualism, whereby property modulates into propriety, that is, possession of the self, and, by extension, subjectivity. Unsurprisingly, London argues that within the eighteenth-century novel these terms are clearly gendered: plots regularly allow women the kind ofproperty in the selfassociated with bourgeois individualism , but they frequently, in their conclusions, reassert the importance of a male-identified civic humanism. The originality ofLondon's thesis consists in taking these familiar understandings and translating them into literary, specifically generic, terms. London's study has two major elements: the first is that representations of women in the eighteenth-century novel provide a vehicle for debates surrounding the nature of property, and that these debates provide a grounding for both female and male subjectivity; the second, that novelists find generic equivalents for the terms of political theory, expressing those understandings of property derived from civic humanism through the form ofpastoral, and exploring understandings of property as self-making through a version of georgic. The danger of such a thesis, as London acknowledges in the introduction, is that it could lead to an overly schematic analysis. Her hope that this danger will be avoided through close attention to texts is justified by the development of her thesis through a series of subtle and intelligent readings. Beginning with extended considerations of Richardson, particularly Clarissa, as exemplifying the georgic, London then goes on to write about MacKenzie's The Man ofFeeling, and Edward Bancroft's Charles Wentworth, as pastoral. Halfway through the book, the focus changes somewhat to various notions of community, as represented in works by Sarah Scott, John Trusler, and others. These works, London argues, "use a politically inflected vocabulary derived from pastoral and georgic to represent the work involved in constructing and sustaining ... alternative orders" (p. 106). London's study concludes in the 1790s with an account of the politics of reading that includes Robert Bage and Jane West. As this brief account suggests, London's structures are indeed "inclusive" (p. 9). Once the definition of property is extended beyond "real property" to include a potentially civilizing subjectivity, the ground to be covered becomes very wide indeed. The mutations in London's argument yield suggestive and stimulating observations, but one might argue that in the latter half of the book richness is achieved at the cost of direction. Shaped by London's discussion of Clarissa as a paradigmatic text and dominated by georgic and pastoral, the first half of the book is satisfyingly coherent. For example, discussion moves from Clarissa's georgic involvement in her dairy, through to the work she performs in writing, to the capacity of that work to transform Belford. The latter, despite his apparently 120 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 peripheral identity, emerges as "positive type ofthe new economic man, one whose inner resources have enabled him to master the effeminacy traditionally associated with mobile forms of property" (p. 52). The model London sets up in this early chapter is convincingly contrasted in her discussion of The Man of Feeling, and it provides a context for her treatment of Millenium Hall. After this, however, pastoral and georgic are somewhat submerged. London's contention that radical writing of the 1790s exploits pastoral allusion while conservative writers such as Jane West espouse "the redemptive power of labour central to georgic" (p. 193) is plausible, but insufficiently substantiated, and it gets lost in the concern of the final chapter with history and romance. Bringing the book up to the historical moment at which her chosen genres are so dramatically transformed that they disappear is a brave move on London's part, but one which requires more ample exposition to be fully successful. In one of the few theoretical statements in the book, London distances herself from...