The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson (review)

Exemplary and illuminating in its interdisciplinary methodology, with a critical eye for "the most minute facts" as Castle Rackrent's glossing editor would observe,¹ Susan B. Egenolf's The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson examines the form and function of the disruptive gloss—from epigraphs to footnotes, from intertitles to ekphrastic media shifts—in the works of three Romantic women novelists (pp. 3-10). Across six chapters, each focusing upon a specific novel published between 1796 and 1827, Egenolf challenges and reorients historical and enduring critical perceptions that women's late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary production might simply serve as "secondary source material, merely an interesting gloss on the primary male text[s]" of Irish and British Romanticism.² Egenolf unites titular writers Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) in a complex, self-conscious, and ambivalent "political and cultural" project firmly grounded in the contexts of Romantic Britain and, specific to the novels considered, critically engaged in the sociopolitical discourses surrounding the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the French Revolution, and the colonization of India, Ireland, and Scotland (p. 13). Egenolf demonstrates that Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson are writers preoccupied with the influential, if not transformative, role literature occupies in constructing and, in the case of the glossed text, rupturing dominant narratives surrounding "gender identity," British national history, and "progress" (p. 74). For Egenolf, the "the key meanings of fictional structuring in the Romantic period appear not only within the central plot but also in apparently subordinate additions, supplements and glosses" (p. 16), and it is at those "breaks in the text where artifice or glossing" appear that these novels most engage the Romantic world (p. 9).

Throughout the book, Egenolf signals the ways in which Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson negotiate the intersecting and vexing questions of nation and "the representation of women"—women as the subjects of fiction, as subjects of hegemonic "truth claims," and as professional, "marketable" writers of fiction (p. 187). Ever judicious in her approach, Egenolf refuses either to "assume uniformity in the values and beliefs of the authors studied" or to divide her subjects into radical or conservative ideological camps (p. 12). Rather, she emphasizes the common generic, rhetorical, and thematic tensions that emerge across all the novels at hand through their layers of varnish and gloss. "Tension" is a word Egenolf often reiterates in her argument, for it not only describes the political climate in Britain and Ireland at this time but also effectively articulates the marginal and "multivocal" power that the disruptive gloss exerts. They "alter our interpretation of the central masculinized narrative" (p. 7) through the intertextual (for example, Owenson's "copious" footnoted references to books about Ireland in The Wild Irish Girl, p. 106), the extratextual (allusions to iconography in Edgeworth's Belinda), and the paratextual (Hamilton's politically charged dedications in both Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and The Cottagers of Glenburnie, pp. 23-26, 145-148).

The argumentative clarity and evidential breadth that characterize The Art of Political Fiction owe much to the wealth and diversity of salient primary and secondary material Egenolf has succeeded in amassing in one volume. She draws from visual art by Claude Lorrain and Joshua Reynolds (among other painters), late eighteenth-century Orientalist miscellanies published by the British Asiatic Society, travel and ethnographic writing from Ireland, and the personal correspondence of all three novelists, situating this material alongside the work of established Romantic scholars Marilyn Butler, Gary Kelly, Julia Wright, and Ina Ferris. This expanse of evidence represents a methodological risk and would surely overwhelm a tenuous thesis with its unwieldy bulk. However, Egenolf integrates and examines evidence with as much care as she does apparent ease, and at every conclusive juncture returns to the pith of her argument.

While each chapter manifests these strengths, Egenolf's consideration of Edgeworth's Belinda (1802) particularly succeeds in its integrative approach, uniting...