Eighteenth-Century Writers in Their World: A Mighty Maze (review)

REVIEWS 133 When denied access to private libraries, women readers turned to the proliferating circulating libraries and book-clubs. These public spaces, although their proprietors insisted on their respectability, were often represented as sites oftransgression , specifically of sexual seductions. And yet the circulating libraries clearly empowered women both as readers and as writers. Although women made up at most only one-third ofthe subscribers to these public libraries, in the culture ofthe day, this reading public was consistently feminized. By gaining access to expensive books, women of all sections of the upper and middling classes gained cultural authority. And, increasingly, this power was extended to the working classes, Pearson shows in her sixth chapter, as literacy was extended to domestic servants and to farm and factory workers through family readings, Sunday schools, and the dissemination of cheap tracts and ballads. Pearson follows the traditional Marxist reading of Hannah More as engaging in a project of "social control" (p. 192), without perhaps giving sufficient credence to the fact that, as Thomas Laqueur and others have shown, the British socialist movement emerged from the very Sunday-school culture of newly literate workers which More helped to create. Pearson concludes by returning to the vexed issue of the novel, discussing one male novelist, Eaton Stannard Barrett, who clearly condemned novel reading by women, in his The Heroine, and three women novelists who apparently concurred with Barrett. But in each female case, as Pearson shows, the reading of novels—whether in Lennox's Female Quixote, Austen's Northanger Abbey, or Sarah Green's Scotch Novel Reading—introduces the heroine to deep-seated structures of patriarchal power which her imaginative life enables her either to endure, escape, or finally transform. Although one sometimes hears the clicking ofkeywords, as numerous examples ofscenes ofreading from widely disparate texts pile up, this book provides a wealth ofuseful information concerning eighteenth-century femalereading practices (and even postures—it was better to read sitting up in a public room than lying down on a sofa or, worse, alone in bed). The only puzzling lacuna, given Pearson's concern with the ideological construction of novel reading by women, is the omission of Anna Barbauld's brilliant Essay on the Origin and Progress ofthe British Novel (1810), in which Barbauld magisterially reconstructs novel writing and reading as the source of virtue and truth, one which grants ultimate moral and thus political authority to women novelists and their readers. Anne K. Mellor University of California, Los Angeles Andrew Varney. Eighteenth-Century Writers in Their World: A Mighty Maze. New York: St Martin's Press, 1999. xi + 238pp. US$55.00. ISBN 0-312-22531-8. In his preface to Eighteenth-Century Writers in Their World Andrew Varney makes it clear that his study is intended primarily as an introduction both to 134 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 the rich heritage of English literature and literary culture 1700-1750 and to the vibrant state of current scholarship in the field. Varney sets out to demonstrate that "the cultural world of eighteenth-century Britain exhibited a kind of promiscuous interest in everything" (p. vii). As a thesis about the attitudes of eighteenthcentury writers to their world, this observation borders on the banal. It works nicely, however, as the manifesto of a book meant to introduce the varied cultural contexts that influenced writers of imaginative literature. The book is divided into eight chapters headed by helpful rubrics such as "Wit and Virtue," "Money and Government," and "Science and Nature." Varney weaves into his discussions of these topical issues analyses of a range of literary genres. He focuses primarily on prose fiction and poetry, but also includes drama and the periodical essay. The strength of Varney's study is his consistent anchoring of broader cultural claims in close readings of individual literary texts. He quotes extended passages from these texts, following his contention that "they need to be seen and heard if the age is to come alive again at all" (p. viii). This practice might seem belletristic in a more scholarly study, but here provides in the best examples a wonderful model for undergraduate students of how to engage in effective literary criticism. Varney's readings...