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Reviewed by:
  • Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot
  • Lesa Scholl
Wilkes, Joanne . Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 183 pp. $99.95.

Women Reviewing Women brings together the inspiration of a women's literary heritage found in Gilbert and Gubar's seminal Madwoman in the Attic and Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, and the critical role of the periodical press in canon-forming. Wilkes refocuses our attention, not on the canonized women novelists but on their contemporary female critics, who played an integral role in making their canonization possible through their reviews, biographies, and histories. By examining female reviewers, this study profiles their participation within the cutthroat world of the periodical press — an environment much recent work has focused on as being available to women because of the convention of anonymity. Essentially, Wilkes addresses the extent to which nineteenth-century female reviewers were influenced by their acute awareness of the often tenuous position of the female author and how that influence is made manifest in their criticism. She challenges assumptions of homogeneity, both in how these women responded to other female writers and in how feminine writing was defined throughout the century.

The connection between Wilkes's reviewers and critics hangs on their engagement with Austen, Brontë, and Eliot. What becomes apparent is the way that, through the context of this triad, they build into each other's work, showing the development of women's criticism throughout the nineteenth century, creating a heritage for women's intellectual activity. In the introductory chapter, Wilkes situates her writers within the conventions of the Victorian periodical press. This is particularly relevant to the convention of anonymity, which they adopted at different times to conceal their womanhood, to have more freedom in expressing their views without having to be personally connected to them or to defer to the bigger, shadowy authority of the journal's voice. Wilkes draws out the tensions created as the freedom of anonymity is mitigated by having to walk the party lines of the periodicals. In this case, the boundaries of expectation are blurred according to editorial authority rather than gender.

Chapter 2, "Maria Jane Jewsbury and Sara Coleridge," centers on the woman writer's awareness of her position within the context of nineteenth-century social expectations. Both Jewsbury's and Coleridge's struggles with reconciling their writing careers with their private lives are explored, along with their consciousness of the practical limitations placed on the women they were reviewing. The key aspect of this chapter, though, is their awareness that as reviewers they were able to shape the public reception of the texts they dealt with and the authors ' public images. Furthermore, the performative nature of gender in writing is revealed, with female critics ventriloquizing masculine voices in their writing style. This thread runs throughout Wilkes's work, informing both the reviewers' responses to fiction and the novelists' response to the reviewers.

The following chapter, "Writing Women's History," turns from the context in which nineteenth-century women were writing to examine the ways in which they bolstered their sense of a literary heritage through writing histories and comparative studies of women's intellectual achievements. The women discussed in this chapterHannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, and Julia Kavanagh—worked as reviewers but had significant literary achievements of their own in writing histories, poetry, and novels respectively. Wilkes emphasizes their conscious act of "rescuing notable women from oblivion, neglect or misrepresentation" (57), likening them to late-twentieth-century [End Page 492] feminist historians. The section on Lawrance focuses on her extensive knowledge of languages and the research of primary texts in her histories, which Wilkes places in the broader context of assumptions about what kinds of history men and women could write. She argues that while women were not seen as able to write real history about wider socio-political events, and were to be restricted to the detail of memoirs, Lawrance was able to achieve both in her writing.

The section on lane Williams plays a crucial part in...

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