Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge, c.1790-1900 (review)

This is a collection with a difference. It is truly collective. Group work in a common workplace and an editing process that began with the project have produced a volume of discrete pieces that fully cohere. Even the book's editorial apparatus, such as a common bibliography and biographies of selected subjects, function as part of the reading experience. The postscript refers the reader to an available database. Altogether, the conception and contents of the volume are professional, thought through, and fully realised— editorially, pedagogically, and intellectually.

The announced topic of women and nineteenth-century scholarship and criticism is a rich cake that may be cut in a variety of ways. The book's coverage of authors is wide and original, including figures well known to twenty-first-century readers—of literature (Augusta Webster, Margaret Oliphant, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley), of art history (Anna Jameson), of theatre history (Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson), of the history of education (Emily and Maria Shirreff), and of the history of religion (Catherine Booth)—as well as many more obscure personages. The volume includes a valuable representation of women's writing across disciplines and a holistic treatment of the work of individual writers: Webster's poetry is linked to her translations and journalism, for example, and Shelley's fiction to her lifelong editing.

Cutting the cake topically, rather than according to the treatment of authors, again offers the familiar and unfamiliar. Such topics as women and translation, education, and professionalisation predictably are given full treatment, but less generally known aspects of women's history in the nineteenth century also receive worthwhile analysis here: for example, the work of pulpit women, women historians, scholars, editors, interior designers, and the representation of actresses by and as artists.

The volume represents the concept of "women's history" as a "history of the interrelationships between 'experience' and 'representation' of cultural forms" (1; Louise M. Newman, "Critical Theory and the History of Women," Journal of Women's History 2.3 [1991]: 59). The contributors take a flexible approach to gender and women's history that, for example, does not dismiss or ignore non-feminist positions: the introduction ends by insisting that "the combination of 'challenge to and complicity with dominant traditions' runs through the work of virtually every woman discussed in this volume" (14). Many of the collection's essays raise recurring if neglected questions which may hover in the consciousness of scholars familiar with the work of many of the individual women discussed. Pieces on scholarship and the writing of art history (by Chloe Chard), editing and compiling (by Richard Allen and Cicely Havely), and translation (Lorna Hardwick) all address the problem of how women writers accommodate their learning to those restricted genres which male networks and discourses permit. Chard argues, for example, in her very interesting article, that Jameson's choice of rhetoric was governed by the necessity to mask her scholarship as fiction and travel writing, in order to fit normative expectations associating men's writing with book learning and women's with developed sensibility.

Havely, in "Mary Cowden Clarke's Labours of Love," treats the woman whose entry into the domain of male scholarship was the most successful of all those discussed. Clarke was the editor of the first scholarly Shakespeare concordance (1844): reliable and unbowdlerised, it made her famous. It too fits into a gendered definition of female scholarship, however, in its alleged alliance with laborious compilation as opposed to more creative and intellectual criticism and interpretation, and in Clarke's readiness, as well as her critics', to eroticise her attachment to Shakespeare as a "labour of love."

One point arising from this essay might have been more prominent in the volume. As the daughter of a publisher and musicologist and the...