Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (review)

REVIEWS 147 moment in history where legal definitions of rape and criminal intent are changing, and shows how, even in that change, prevailing paternalistic attitudes are reasserted. While Fielding's fiction anticipates real-life controversies and changing legal definitions, it still relies on paternalistic assumptions, such as the absolute distinction between virtuous and non-virtuous woman. Here Staves's powerful examples demonstrate that in legal theory and practice concerning rape, the domestic construction of women encases and silences them. More striking yet in her discussion is the sense of contemporaneity: many of the reforms anticipated in Fielding's time did not come into legal existence until 1956, while, as today's debates over women and violence demonstrate all too clearly, the moral ambiguity surrounding rape victims still persists. In a collection marked by substantive strengths, the flaws are mostly textual. Typographical lapses, however, in some instances lead to substantive incoherence. Documentation could be more precisely edited to eliminate incorrectly numbered notes and obscure references. A firmer editorial hand is needed generally, as some of the essays suffer from occasional stylistic obscurity, and others from a lack of focus. These are relatively minor failings, however, given the book's overall strength in both its essays and their arrangement (which is best described as a sensitive and unobtrusive coherence: essays are ordered chronologically, but placed so as to highlight thematic connections). Indeed, the range, quality, and rationale of this collection make it a substantial and significant contribution not only to the historical understanding of women and gender but also to current views of the nature of textuality. Katherine Quinsey University of Windsor Catherine Gallagher. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. xxiv + 339pp. ISBN 0-520-08510-8. Catherine Gallagher's dense, ingenious study of women's imaginative writing as part of economic history merits applause alike for what it achieves and what it avoids. Avoidances first: it does not essentialize, isolate, or sentimentalize the female writer, dismiss critics of other persuasions, or make extravagant claims. Its paramount achievement is to provide a fresh way of understanding an apparently disparate group of fiction makers—Aphra Behn, Delarivière Manley, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth—who participate in the novel's development as a self-conscious mode. That development, in Gallagher's view, is implicated in the rise of a market economy. Her way of formulating relationships between fiction and money sheds new light on both. The organizing image ofNobody's Story is, precisely, nobody (or nothing). Nothing defines women's genital absence and social negligibility, the nature of economic substance at the moment of market exchange, and the elusive persona of the author. It also designates the non-referentiality of fiction. By the time Frances Burney explicidy addressed her adolescent diary to "Nobody," a rich cluster of meaning had established itself around the idea of "nobodiness." Gallagher, while locating such meaning, declares herself interested , more broadly, in how the terms "'woman,' 'author,' 'marketplace,' and 'fiction' ... reciprocally defined each other in the literature" she analyses (p. xviii). She rejects special causal status for any of these ideas: the history of the economy, for instance, does not 148 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 in her view explain the history of authorship. Her book investigates an intricate and shifting complex of connections, using them to support revelatory interpretations of individual texts as well as to understand authorial careers and historical movements. Examining authorship in its textual and biographical manifestations over a century and a half, Gallagher discovers important historical change. (Nobody's Story appeared as part of a series called The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics.) Aphra Behn, subject to the same pressures male Restoration playwrights faced, employed a female persona to resist them. Like her contemporaries, she needed to earn her livelihood and to protect her personal identity. She accomplished both aims by constructing an audacious representation of her authorial self as a prostitute, behind which lurked the "pure" and unknowable woman. Her "gender-specific version of possessive individualism" (p. 25) contradicted general assumptions about the woman as inalienable property of her husband and created a new mode...