Women's Reading in Britain 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation (review)

REVIEWS 131 Mander recognizes that, while emphasizing "the historical variability of reading practices" (p. 187), her study has analysed only two distinctive, historically determined reading paradigms for the first-person narrative, and even here, the terrain is difficult to map. To underscore the complexity of the enterprise, she concludes with a look at Prévost's first novel, Mémoires d'un homme de qualité, which, while contemporary with Marivaux's work, points towards a subversion of the "circle of learning" trope articulated earlier. In this novel, as in Marivaux's texts, the narrator functions in large part as the mediator of universal truths, but an element of what Mander calls "ironic cross-referencing" also creeps in to place the mentor's moral authority in question, his voice situated in a conflictual, dialogic relationship with other voices without definitive resolution. Prévost's later texts would only accentuate this conflict, claims Mander, hinting that the "pedagogic circle" was on the verge of being broken and the reader's role redefined in important new ways. The author's efforts to reconstruct the reading practices of early eighteenthcentury French readers will certainly be of great interest to scholars working in the period and her assessment ofthe presuppositions underlying modern narratological theory may also help them set about the project with fresh eyes. Michael J. Call Brigham Young University Jacqueline Pearson. Women 's Reading in Britain 1 750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ? + 300pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-58439-6. In this thoroughly researched and extremely informative book, Jacqueline Pearson surveys the female reader in British culture between 1750 and 1835. She tracks the historical emergence of an ever-growing body of female readers across all class lines, as well as the evolving ways in which female readers and their reading practices were represented in the novels of this period. This book thus functions as a useful prequel to Kate Flint's The Woman Reader, 1837-1914 (1993). Women readers were dangerous, both to others and to themselves. While male reading was universally recommended as the path to a rational education and civilized behaviour, female reading was ideologically fraught. It might increase female rationality, but at the same time it distracted women from their domestic duties and aroused transgressive, especially sexual, desires. What, when, and how women read thus became sites of political conflict and cultural surveillance. Pearson first shows us how selected male writers viewed women readers: Fielding mocked them, Richardson encouraged them but carefully distinguished good female reading practices from bad ones, Johnson actively patronized women as 132 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 writers but was profoundly ambivalent towards them as readers, while Byron became increasingly hostile to his female reading public as he acknowledged their growing power over his literary career and reputation. What women should be permitted to read was a matter of intense debate. As Pearson shows, all books, even the Bible, struck someone as inappropriate for women readers; for all books, again including the Bible, could be read subversively. Nonetheless, females were most strongly encouraged to read history, since it provided exempla of both virtue and truth; then travel-writing, which offered escape and modes ofresistance to foreign powers and cultures even as it promoted European superiority; then didactic poetry and drama; science, especially botany; and finally the classics of antiquity and Europe, almost always in bowdlerized translation. They were told not to read philosophy or metaphysics, especially that written by the French Philosophes and the British Jacobins. By far the greatest cultural anxiety over women's reading was produced by the novel, which women wrote and read during this period in increasing numbers and with unmasked pleasure. As represented in novels written by women (Pearson ranges widely here, surveying More, Austen, Smith, Radcliffe, and a host of others), female reading offers a multiplicity of pleasures, "from escapism to the discovery of one's true identity, from domesticity to revolutionary alternatives " (p. 105). But each reading pleasure has its accompanying peril. If reading communally intensified family ties, when shared between mother and daughter, it often registered the daughter's "matrophobia" (p. 105). If it articulated the pleasures of...