Belinda, and: Letters for Literary Ladies, and: A Sicilian Romance (review)

102 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 Rien ne permet de conclure de façon décisive. Pourtant, si l'on a été sensible au talent de conteur de Vivant Denon dans Point de lendemain, et à la concise élégance de son style, on peut avec une certaine légitimité douter qu'il soit l'auteur de ces polissonneries. Si l'on possède déjà le recueil de la Pléiade, Romanciers du xvuf siècle, dont le volume 2 (1965) contient Point de lendemain, il est tout à fait inutile de se procurer cette nouvelle édition. La notice historique d'Anatole France, qui parut pour la première fois dans La Vie littéraire, pour agréable qu'elle soit à lire, ne contribue pas vraiment à l'appréciation du texte. Marie-France Silver Collège Glendon, Université York Maria Edgeworth. Belinda. Ed. Eiléan ni Chuilleanáin. London: J.M. Dent, 1993. xxv + 474pp. £6.99. ISBN 0-460-87228-1. Maria Edgeworth. Letters for Literary Ladies. Ed. Claire Connolly. London: J.M. Dent, 1993. xxvi + 95pp. £4.99. ISBN 0-460-87250-8. Ann Radcliffe. A Sicilian Romance. Ed. Alison Milbank. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xxxi + 209pp. US$12.50. ISBN 0-19-282212On 2 November 1783, two years after she had arrived with her family to settle at Edgeworthstown in County Longford, Ireland, the young Maria Edgeworth wrote to her friend Fanny Robinson: "You would be infinitely diverted with the strokes of characters and Irish Bulls as they are called which I laugh at almost every day and all day long— A labourer came with a complaint to my father and concluded with these words: 'he bid me to go to the Devil and I came straight to your honor.'" Edgworth's humour here seems at first glance typically colonialist; she is laughing at the verbal blunder of an Irish tenant struggling to speak the language of her own dominant class, the AngloIrish . But her pleasure in this passage is more complex. As she was to display so ably in her first novel, Castle Rackrent, adopting a native Irish voice delighted precisely because it allowed her the subversive ambiguity employed by the Irish Catholics themselves. She could, with them, call an Anglo-Irish patriarch a devil and laugh about it. Indeed, Edgeworth had patriarchal demons to exorcise before she began to write for a public audience. As Claire Connolly tells us in her introduction to Edgeworth's first published work, Letters for Literary Ladies (1795), after Edgeworth's failed attempt to publish a translation of Mme de Genlis's Adèle et Théodore, her father, Richard, allowed himself to be persuaded by his friend Thomas Day that Maria ought neither to read nor write novels. The ban lasted seven years, that is, until Day's death in 1789 when Edgeworth was twenty-two. Although during these years Richard Edgeworth violated the spirit of Day's request by continuing to teach his daughter history, French drama, economics, and politics, his reservations about fiction show up in the advertisement for Edgeworth's second novel, Belinda (1801), a work "offered to the public as a Moral Tale—the author not wishing to acknowledge a Novel." By describing her fiction as "moral" Edgeworth sought to identify it with the acknowledged moral authority of women in the domestic realm. Similarly, reconciling the public REVIEWS 103 activity of writing with the private realm of domesticity is the project of Edgeworth's Letters for Literary Ladies, an epistolary conduct book. She silences the objections of Thomas Day and others to the authority of female authorship, as Mary Wollstonecraft had done only three years before in Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman, by arguing that educated women, indeed literary women, make the best wives and mothers. In an opening exchange of letters, Edgeworth adopts the voice of Thomas Day, who reveals that he dislikes literary women because their pleasure in poetry and philosophy distracts them from domestic duties such as "ordering dinner, or paying the butcher's bill" (p. 12). This desire for a domestic drudge serves as subtext for a generalized denigration of women's intellectual powers: "In the course of...