Women Writing about Money: Women's Fiction in England, 1790-1820 (review)

REVIEWS 547 luck" (pp. 78-79). Such statements represent a loss of perspective that somewhat weakens what is in general a useful compendium of information about women, publishing, and the marketplace in the eighteenth century. Mona Scheuermann Oakton Community College Edward Copeland. Women Writing about Money: Women's Fiction in England , 1790-1820. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxii + 291pp. US$49.95. ISBN 0-521-45461-1. Edward Copeland's Women Writing about Money is a solid and sensible study of the use and meaning of money in the lives of women as seen in the fiction of female writers. It is a comprehensive effort, encompassing a period of a generation (1790-1820), which examines in depth fiction conventionally considered subliterary in quality. The brilliant exceptions of the period are, of course, Jane Austen, followed by Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth. While the expected benefit of such a study is the description and analysis of the marginal writers, the "lesser fry" (p. 2) of the Minerva Press authors and the Lady's Magazine correspondents, one is not surprised to see an entire chapter and many other references devoted to Jane Austen. It is startling to note, however, that Copeland gives little attention to Burney and Edgeworth. This limited compass, the book's one major shortcoming, reduces the scholarly value of an otherwise excellent work. The admirable features of the book are many. The first chapter begins with a useful survey of the economic value of the late-eighteenth-century English pound, a feature rarely noted in literary studies and one absolutely essential to Copeland's mission. After patiently 'examining why a pittance or a fortune (expressed as a lump sum) produces an income of about five per cent of its worth per year, he outlines the social standing purchased through the entire income range: for example £20 to £40 a year—"the humble curate" (p. 25); £500 a year—"a three servant income" (p. 30); £800 to £1,000—a carriage; and over £4,000 a year—"a house in the country and a season in town" (p. 32). Copeland devotes a chapter to the "gothic economics" of the 1790s, a period of passive upheaval in women's fiction, in which economic shocks were visited upon heroines powerless to advance their fortunes or to prevent financial disaster. While it is not clear why the protagonists of the 1790s had less control than those of the succeeding two decades, Copeland clearly makes the case for the difference. Most often, of course, the sudden Gothic news is very bad—widowhood, eviction, loss of social standing, debtors' prison, ruin—but occasionally, the change in fortune is joyful—an inheritance or the appearance of a man of means. Copeland bolsters his claim that "after 1800 ... women's fiction abandons, bit by bit, its narrative of economic victimization to embrace a narrative of economic empowerment ... [as women become the] managers of the domestic budget" (p. 61) by reference to a series of graphs showing the frequency of various plot devices in the Lady's Magazine. These convincingly demonstrate that plots with an "impoverished heroine saved by marriage" decrease while those where women are "responsible for [the] welfare of family" or where "housekeeping [is] significant to [the] heroine" increase dramatically through the period. In addition, he shows that Jane Austen's "works follow a pattern familiar to all women's fiction of her generation" (p. 114). 548 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:4 Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book, however, is Copeland's discussion and analysis of the complex matrix of attitudes towards the employment of women. For Austen, Burney, Edgeworth, and Wollstonecraft, employment represents a social descent, but the less literary "didactic novels stress the respectability of female employment ... for those women of the pseudo-gentry, the daughters of clergymen and other genteel professionals ... who have fallen on hard times" (p. 163). Most interesting is his classification of such positions as "odious": companion and governess; and "possible": schoolmistress, seamstress, actress, and even prostitute (pp. 166-90). The key distinction between the two classes is that while the odious positions convey more prestige, the others provide more independence. Copeland has provided a useful guide...