Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot (review)

Joanne Wilkes's Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a valuable contribution to the study of female authorship in the context of the nineteenth-century periodical press. Focusing on women's non-fictional writing about other literary women for a wide range of nineteenth-century periodicals and drawing extensively on letters, memoirs, and manuscripts, it offers fresh insight into the role that women's literary criticism played in canon formation and debates about professionalization in relation to which they constructed their authorial identities. In spite of the expectations that its subtitle builds, this meticulously researched book is not primarily about the critical reception of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Rather, by examining the ways in which these three leading female authors were read and reviewed by their contemporaries and antecedents, it refocuses critical attention on the careers of overlooked women such as Sara Coleridge, Maria Jane Jewsbury, Julia Kavanagh, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, and Anne Mozley, not to mention the better-known Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward.

Wilkes's in-depth analysis of the role played by these eight female literary critics—who (with the exception of Oliphant and Ward) remain at the margins of Victorian studies—in the canonisation of leading novelists such as Austen, Brontë, and Eliot is the most notable aspect of her monograph. Wilkes's four grouped chapters show the distinctive ways in which they build upon and refer to each other's work. In so doing, Wilkes challenges assumptions about the homogeneity of female reviewers' contributions to the development of literary criticism and about the writing of women's literary history. It is clear from the introductory chapter that this book works at the intersection of print media and feminist historiography and hence complements other studies of nineteenth-century women and the periodical press—for example, Alexis Easley's First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, 1830-70 (2004), which demonstrates the ways in which female writing is informed by self-awareness of the tenuous position of women in the literary marketplace.

The second chapter on "Maria Jane Jewsbury and Sara Coleridge" examines the two writers' versatile negotiations with the ideology of separate spheres as they struggled to reconcile their "literary career[s] to the demands of domestic life" through reliance on the publishing policy of anonymity (22). In spite of the differences between Jewsbury and Coleridge, their reviews provide an implicit commentary upon their power to influence the public images of the authors they review, revealing a concomitant tension between the growing confidence of their professional voices as reviewers and the need to subsume it under the corporate voice of the journals for which they wrote. Wilkes stresses Jewsbury and Coleridge's awareness that the literary personae they created through the adoption of a masculine voice in their writing as critics "were not simply reflections of the authors' personalities, but involved a greater or lesser degree of deliberate construction" (24); this observation sets the framework within which Wilkes continues her exploration of the performative nature of gender in periodical reviews, biography, and history in the chapters that follow.

Chapter 3, "Writing Women's Literary History," displays the versatility of female reviewers by placing pioneering attempts at feminist historiography by Lawrance, Williams, and Kavanagh in the context of debates on the nature of female intellectuality. Wilkes assesses the implications behind these writers' choice of signed publication and the diversity of the rhetorical strategies that they consciously deployed in order to rescue "notable women from oblivion, neglect or misrepresentation" and to argue for the compatibility of intellectuality with femininity (57). Their questioning of assumptions about masculine and feminine capabilities enabled them to unite "the fields of male history and female memoir" in their historical accounts of the intellectual achievements of women (for example, Elizabeth Barrett Browning) who...