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  • Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot
  • Kara M. Ryan (bio)
Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë And George Eliot, by Joanne Wilkes. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. 194 pp. $99.95.

Joanne Wilkes’s book, Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, while seemingly limited in focus, arrives at comprehensive insights regarding the critic’s ability both to construct authorial personae and to effect literary history; as such, this study should appeal to scholars with specific interests in those authors and critics who comprise Wilkes’s subjects as well as to scholars with generalized interests in feminist criticism, genre theory, and canon formation. Wilkes examines a diverse group of female critics, nearly all of whom are authors in their own right: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Augusta Ward. In the book’s introduction, Wilkes poses the questions that drive her study of the relationship between Austen, Brontë, and Eliot and their reviewers:

If these three novelists evidently found venturing into print as women problematic, then how far did women, working in the same environment but as literary critics, respond to these writers specifically as women novelists? [End Page 472] Moreover, to what extent was their writing as critics affected by their own awareness of a literary context where women’s writing was often seen as different from men’s, and where a woman’s intellectual capacities for making authoritative judgments were not universally assumed?

(p.3)

Thus, she situates the eight critics within heightened self-consciousness, analogizing their creative experiences to those of Austen, Brontë, and Eliot.

The introduction sketches out the emerging public reputations of these three women novelists, which Wilkes rightly attributes to a few influential works published over the course of the nineteenth century. Henry Austen’s Biographical Notice (1817 and 1832), along with James Edward Austen’s Memoir of Jane Austen (1869), promulgated Austen as a self-effacing author whose novels simultaneously embodied “delicacy” and verisimilitude (p. 17). Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) regarded Brontë’s novels and characters as produced from a wild hearth and home, including exposure to coarse masculinity (p. 18). John Walter Cross’s Life and Letters of George Eliot (1885) mitigated the impressive intellectual accomplishments of Marian Evans, asserting that they were produced because of “a series of male influences” (p. 19). The question at the heart of these four influential studies is the same one that haunted the eight reviewers who are the subjects of Wilkes’s analyses: what accounts for the aesthetic differences in novels by women?

This book is ambitious and has a logical system of inquiry. Within each chapter, Wilkes prefaces analysis of each reviewer’s take on Austen, Brontë, and Eliot with an informative summary of the reviewer’s oeuvre. Having addressed the issue of anonymity in her introduction, Wilkes delineates authorial identification through a reviewer’s individual works. Some particularly insightful sections occur when she analyzes those reviewers who, like the female authors they might be reviewing, forged a male identity. In various cases, Wilkes reads such ventriloquism as either signifying the reviewer’s own ambivalent attitude toward women writers or as a conscious gesture meant to challenge essentialist and reductive perceptions of them.

The most interesting passages of Wilkes’s book occur in her presentation of several of these reviewers’ critical interpretations of specific works, particularly those analyses that ran against prevailing currents or those that seem to anticipate postmodern readings. For example, although Julia Kavanagh was uneasy about Jane Austen’s artistry—she regarded the author’s irony as reflecting “detachment from her creations”—she did extol the author’s final, posthumously published novel Persuasion for “[showing] ‘the phase of [Austen’s] literary character which she chose to keep most in the shade: the tender and the sad’” (p. 81). According to Kavanagh, Persuasion was “the first genuine picture of that silent torture of an unloved [End Page 473] woman, condemned to suffer thus because she...

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