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320 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:3 exerted the power they in fact possessed. Again, here was a fact not lost on Mary Wollstonecraft when she labelled pernicious the ways that women, denied political power and education, use sexuality to manipulate men; she pleads for women to gain power over themselves, not over others, a plea difficult to fulfil when the harsh economic facts of life intruded upon any woman, single or married. In fact, the cost to a woman of being on her own was very high: a ten-thousand-pound dowry might yield a good fortune, but even that would not amount to the five-hundreda -year that Virginia Woolf later described as the minimum for freedom. Such exigencies drove a respectable woman with insufficient provisions to become a "humble companion" to a woman more generously supplied with worldly goods. Because men inhabited the club or the profession to the exclusion of the home, upper-class women had no recourse except a female companion for respectability in social ventures. Finally, of course, in some cases women simply chose to be companionate with other women in friendships, sexual relationships, or community-building altruistic enterprises such as Sarah Scott's Millennium Hall. In such cases as these, Rizzo explores women's capacity for altruism or benevolence . What had begun as sensibility, to be inculcated in both genders, had, by century's end, become largely appropriated by women. If a woman were placed in a potentially exploitive relationship with another woman (and it was routine for a certain class to be so placed), what were the strains and what were the results? Betty Rizzo illustrates her thesis with bawds and reformers, wives and mistresses, inhabitants of the court and the country. In fact, the only criticism might be her desire to provide a complete story, occasionally indulging in phrases such as "she must have felt that" as she is speaking of a biographical figure. It is probably difficult to resist supplying motives in as fascinating a story as the power moves of Elizabeth Montagu while she attends to the fortune of her aging husband or the plot twists in the escapades of Lady Cathcart when she is locked away by her conniving spouse. A reader might desire a fuller analysis of this paradigm of tyranny. Rizzo briefly but tantalizingly refers several times to the ego development theory of Nancy Chodorow (p. 54) and suggests that the alliance between mother and daughter could provide a psychosocial determinant for empathy in women but could also predispose women to become infantilized in abusive situations. Her failure to follow this up is probably less an oversight than a reflection of the still incomplete state of the scholarly conversation about female power. Theorists such as Carol Gilligan are examining "the female resister" and others are beginning to examine what happens to Chodorow's theory when there is an abusing father and passive mother. Despite its abbreviated treatment of the subject, Companions without Vows will contribute to this conversation because it so thoroughly explores women and power in an eighteenth-century context. Carol Poston Saint-Xavier University Deborah D. Rogers. The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. xlvii + 262pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-313-28031-2. Ann Radcliffe, like the Gothic novel itself, is enjoying renewed popularity. She regularly appears on undergraduate syllabi, while, as Deborah D. Rogers shows, criticism of her mature novels is burgeoning. Nonetheless, she still presents a critical problem, for historically her reputation varied widely. Where contemporary readers gasped, shuddered, REVIEWS 321 and sighed at her exciting plots and evocative descriptions, many later readers sneered and giggled. Indeed, virtually no treatments of individual novels appeared in the nineteenth century. Moreover, until recently, twentieth-century critics have attributed Radcliffe's contemporary popularity to the degenerated taste of a (largely female) "mass" audience. The paradox of Radcliffe is that she has been both strongly influential and despised. Rogers has provided an enjoyable record of this paradox. Part of the series of Critical Responses in Arts andLetters edited by Cameron Northouse, 7"Ae Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe comprises an historical anthology of excerpts from reviews, articles, books, and readers' letters chronicling the...

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