Henry Fielding: A Literary Life (review)

REVIEWS 369 scrupulosity probably accounts for these inadequacies: she tries to claim only what she knows for sure. The reader, though, may want more. Certainly this reader wanted more in the way of critical insight and argument . Fletcher's desire for a general audience probably accounts for some of her book's critical weakness. Although I admired the avoidance of academic jargon, I found her efforts to reach a large public often irritating and sometimes misleading . She refers to her subject consistently as "Charlotte." She panders to popular misconceptions of eighteenth-century literature, commenting that Pope "bitchily " describes a poet "Obliged by hunger, and request of friends" (p. 54) and apologizing for the period's typography (she assumes the reader's distaste for abundant exclamation points) and its emphasis on Sensibility (a word that she invariably capitalizes). She claims Smith's "originality" in linking "feeling, sympathy , imagination, sexual responsiveness" under the category of sensibility (p. 186), although many other late eighteenth-century writers draw on the same combination of feelings. Similarly, she chastizes her subject for a confusion between sense and sensibility, likewise typical ofthe literary moment. She refers coyly and repeatedly to a girl named "Jenny" who reads and parodies Smith; Jenny in due course turns out to be Jane Austen. Fletcher's strongestcritical insight—that Smith inaugurates the literary practice of using castles as metaphors for the nation—gets repeated to the point of extreme tedium. Apparently most comfortable in her populist mode, Fletcher becomes awkward in citing other critics, who often appear arbitrarily, and in her attempt to trace a line of influence between Smith and Austen . Her argument, although occasionally persuasive, suffers from her apparent lack of awareness of the complex novelistic tradition that Smith and Austen alike inhabited. IfSmith provided "influence," so did the many other eighteenth-century woman novelists whom Austen read. But if Fletcher has not produced an entirely satisfactory study, she has at least called careful attention to an important and neglected writer. The scrupulous research and ambitious effort of this biography merit praise, and the information about Charlotte Smith here provided will be valuable to many workers in the field. Patricia Meyer Spacks University of Virginia Harold Pagliaro. Henry Fielding: A LiteraryLife. Literary Lives. New York: St Martin's Press, 1998. ix + 237pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-312-2103032-9. The mandate of the Literary Lives series is "to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts" that shaped the careers ofthe writers it represents, and Harold Pagliaro's study ofHenry Fielding provides a good example ofthis kind ofliterary biography. Pagliaro's succinct study provides a well-written introduction to the large social and political forces that shaped Fielding's experiences as a writer and a magistrate, as well as a cogent account of the formal and thematic concerns 370 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:3 governing his most important works. For teachers and students of eighteenthcentury studies, this work will prove helpful both as a reference work and as a starting point for further reading. The study begins and ends with brief biographical sketches of Fielding's life. Drawing on the work of Martin C. Battestin, Wilbur Cross, and Pat Rogers, these sketches take the reader from Fielding's childhood in East Stour and at Sharpham Park, the author's birthplace. Pagliaro dwells on the rich cultural history informing Sharpham Park's association with Glastonbury Abbey, suggesting that the landscape ofthe abbey and its Dorsetenvirons providedFielding with an Edenic setting for his novels. He then turns to the major crisis ofFielding's childhood, the death ofhis mother and remarriage ofhis father, which resulted in a custody battle between Fielding's maternal grandparents and his father. The court records that remain provide us with the history of a tumultuous family feud and insight into the mind of a prepubescent boy who may or may not have committed "indecent actions" with his four-year-old sister. Pagliaro moves through Fielding's years at Eton and his early years in London to his marriage to Charlotte Cradock in 1734, and forward through his career as playwright, magistrate, novelist, and journalist, chronicling Fielding's friendships, political attitudes, the death of his first wife and his...