Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess. A New Novel (1693) (review)

REVIEWS 151 32). Or look at the reference to Mary Ann Doane on Joan Crawford that is offered as supplementary commentary on the conceptual pertinence of Irigaray for the purpose of reading Behn (p. 29n). Craft-Fairchild is not concerned with differences between spectatorship in eighteenth-century fiction and in film, and the highest praise in her book is that Burney's The Wanderer "anticipates the work of Luce Irigaray" (p. 160). Such manoeuvres may serve as theoretical shock therapy, but they are questionable as a large-structural method. Maybe the importance of Inchbald's writing is to anticipate twentieth-century feminist theory. But literary criticism such as Craft-Fairchild's is not the place to look for reflections on what this historical claim might mean. Rhetorically and conceptually, Masquerade and Gender accords intellectual priority to Irigaray and other twentieth-century feminists rather than to women writers of the eighteenth century. Craft-Fairchild's use of ahistorical parallels should therefore itself be considered in relation to her identification of masquerade as "the arena for female loss" (p. 56). In her own technical sense, it is no theory-hostile misgiving to say that this book responds to "the masquerade of femininity" with a masquerade of theory. David C. Hensley McGiIl University Anon. Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess. A New Novel (1693). Ed. with an introduction by Hubert McDermott. Princess Grace Irish Library, no. 7. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993. xl + 107pp. £14.95. ISBN 0-86140-305-3. The strongest claim made here for Vertue Rewarded is that this is the first "Irish" novel. Certainly, there are, as yet, no known contenders of earlier date, so that the claim may stand—and a fiction set in Clonmel, in County Tipperary, at the time of the Siege of Limerick in 1690 has its own claims on the reader's attention. In addition, however, Hubert McDermott sees Vertue Rewarded both as the prototype of the "romance of passion " and as a notable precursor of, and possible influence on, Richardson's Pamela. Of these subsidiary claims, the former is probably the stronger. "The heroine," as McDermott suggests, is a "ravishing beauty, and she is also innocent and defenceless. ... The male is an aristocrat—a prince in this case—who is a typical libertine-seducer" (pp. xviiixix ). However, the case begins to weaken almost immediately. "One notable exception in this regard is that he has no 'history' as later rakes do" (p. xix), the editor admits, and soon we are being informed that "Inevitably, because it is such an early romance of passion , Vertue Rewarded differs in some respects from later models" (p. xxi). The most notable exceptions, the editor confesses, are the absence of "warm" scenes and the uncharacteristic ending in marriage. As for the influence on Richardson, it is doubtful that anyone would have made much of some few superficial similarities had not the subtitle so obviously suggested them. In fact, the discussion of these similarities (pp. xxxvff.) is unlikely to convince the sceptical reader, especially since McDermott makes comparatively little of such possibilities as Pamela's declaration, "Yet, Sir, I will be bold to say, I am honest, though poor: and if you was a prince, I would not be otherwise." Few readers will want to go farther than the unexceptionable suggestion that "It is not inconceivable that Vertue Rewarded was one of the books Richardson was asked to read to the needleworkers" when he was a young boy (p. xxix). 152 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 Little of McDermott's argument is actually new, for it has variously appeared in the Durham University Journal (June 1985), Studies (Summer 1986), and in his book, Novel and Romance (1989). What we do have here, however, is the text of Vertue Rewarded— and since the book apparently exists in only two copies, one in the British Museum and the other in the Bodleian Library, we may be grateful for that. Presentation of the text is not beyond reproach. The brief note on the text (p. xli) is not very forthcoming, and in certain respects apparently at odds with the text itself. Occasionally, too, doubts arise about accuracy, especially given the sprinkling of misprints...