Jane Austen's Novels: The Art of Clarity (review)

REVIEWS 95 he believes most affected women: key among them, the increasing power and prestige of professionals within the middle class and increasing literacy and reliance on print culture. "Woman" figured largely in that print culture, both as author and as subject : "not only a powerful figure in the rhetoric of cultural revolution, but a field of struggle, fought over by factions contending for leadership and definition of that revolution ." Wollstonecraft participated in this struggle, attempting "the most thorough feminist transformation of the cultural revolution in her time" (pp. 20-21). Each of the seven subsequent chapters deals with a segment of her life and any literary works written in the period under scrutiny; and each is organized in roughly the same way: an initial discussion of the immediate social context; subsequent attention to any relevant literary contexts; careful analysis of the style, rhetorical strategies, and content of each literary work; and a conclusion including any information available about reception and a final assessment of each work's significance. The value of Kelly's book lies, however, not so much in his materialist approach or methodical thoroughness, as in his extraordinary command of all the subjects he is called upon to address. His expertise on the revolutionary period in England and France and familiarity with English fiction of the Romantic period equips him to understand the nature of Wollstonecraft's literary accomplishments as few others have. Kelly's work is a gold mine of thought-provoking connections: between Wollstonecraft and other contemporaries , between her works and the works or events that inspired them, between her thought on revolution and that of other revolutionaries. His chapter on the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (chap. 5) is an especially good case in point as it elucidates Wollstonecraft 's keen consciousness of language and clever feminist abduction of "women's genres" for her own subversive purposes. But his chapter on her Historical and Moral View of ... the French Revolution (chap. 6) may be Kelly's most useful contribution to Wollstonecraft studies. Certainly it allows this work to emerge from the long shadows cast by her two more famous treatises: "she restricts her treatment to the Revolution of 1789, but does so in a way that implies commentary on the Jacobin Revolution of 1793" (p. 153). Kelly's study should afford most readers many pleasant and stimulating surprises. To whet their appetites I call attention to his evenhanded way of discussing Wollstonecraft's style, the single most frequently criticized feature of her writing. Kelly periodically recalls the nature of her project—"to effect a 'revolution in female manners' by means of a writing revolution" (p. 228)—in order to drive home the point that her style, of a piece with her chosen subject matter, is deliberately "transgressive." This describes brilliantly and provocatively, but neither deplores nor celebrates, Wollstonecraft's infamous polemical diction and cumulative syntax: "transgressive writing, like irony, may fall between two incompatible standards of coherence and artistry, failing to meet either" (p. 138). A very persuasive vindication of the vindicator. Syndy McMillen Conger Western Illinois University Roger Gard. Jane Austen's Novels: The Art of Clarity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. ix + 261pp. US$30.00. ISBN 0-300-05494-7. Being precisely the kind of historically oriented, ideologically attuned critic that Roger Gard disdains, I can hardly be expected to appreciate his book. And this, no doubt, is his 96 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:1 point. For Gard's fundamental contention is that critics who insist on the historical or ideological complexities of Austen's works distort the novels beyond recognition and fail to understand what.is most important about Austen's accomplishment: her artistic value and technique. Austen's genius, Gard argues, is her clarity, a simple virtue which has been flattened by "modem heavy—ever heavier-weight—academic criticism" (p. 2). Her art is great because her points are generally "obvious"—so obvious "that a detailed evocation from (yet another) critic is [often] not necessary" (p. 79). That Gard nevertheless feels compelled to write a dense academic text to protect Austen from her scholars and to clarify what is obvious is, one suspects, an irony she herself...