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Reviewed by:
  • Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830
  • Laura Stenberg (bio)
Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830, by Jennie Batchelor. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. 249 pp. $89.95.

Jennie Batchelor’s Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 unites two previously distinct lines of inquiry—literary representations of laboring women and historical studies of women’s literary work as labor—into a complete, though not seamless, study. The term “work,” Batchelor argues, can encompass intellectual, manual, and affective labor though, she acknowledges, not always necessarily on equal terms (p. 11). Her volume presents chronologically ordered case studies of women authors “who offered a sustained interrogation of questions surrounding gender, labour and authorship . . . and whose treatment of women’s work was implicated in key developments in the field of political economy and the literary public sphere’s self-theorization” (p. 24). Several of Batchelor’s subjects are familiar in this context, particularly Charlotte Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft, but her treatment of them delivers new and insightful offerings, and her final chapter, which focuses on women applicants to the Literary Fund, adds a rich dimension to her discussion.

The first three chapters are devoted to Sarah Scott, Smith, and Wollstonecraft. Batchelor argues that for these women, as well as the applicants to the Literary Fund, “work” could be “positively constitutive of female experience,” and the discourse of labor was subsequently used by them to “valorize the practice of authorship in a literary marketplace which increasingly articulated its legitimacy through such language” (p. 23). Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) comes into consideration for its oft-discussed female community founded on laboring women, but examined more thoroughly are The History of Cornelia (1750) and A Journey Through Every Stage of Life (1754). Careful close reading of the latter substantiates Batchelor’s claim that Scott’s early writings challenged “the gendered assumptions underwritten by sentimental theories of commerce,” effectively “making women agents in the civilizing process of commercialization rather than passive markers of its progress” (p. 40). As Batchelor moves to examine Scott’s later texts, she engages with theories of gift economy, particularly work done by Lewis Hyde, to argue that Scott’s paratexts and frame narratives cast her own authorial work, and those of her characters, as “humane labour” able to confer benefits “upon all parties engaged in the production and consumption of the gift-text” (p. 62). This consideration of work within a gift paradigm is surprising but nevertheless persuasive.

Turning to Smith, Batchelor reads her paratextual writings and fiction alongside select works from Adam Smith and John Locke and successfully illustrates that Charlotte Smith’s treatment of work is highly “strategic” and merits further examination. Batchelor notes that studies of Smith’s [End Page 168] novels have generally taken her “prefatorial assertions of authorial embarrassment and indignation at their word” (p. 71); she asserts that these texts might instead be considered as part of Smith’s deliberate critique of the literary marketplace for failing to “live up [to] the standards of professionalism it claimed to uphold” (p. 97). For Smith’s female protagonists, particularly those of The Old Manor House (1793), The Banished Man (1794), and Marchmont (1796), Batchelor illustrates that these heroines are aware of their “labouring potential” and subsequent “ability to exist outside the domestic and reproductive economies” (p. 101).

In agreement with recent criticism on Wollstonecraft and social class, Batchelor suggests that her treatment of women’s work was somewhat tangled. While Wollstonecraft sought to renegotiate women’s roles in the “nation’s political and moral economies” using “the language of labour,” she nevertheless insisted on a clear distinction between “valuable work,” requiring reflection and promoting the general good, and “mere drudgery,” which served to dull the mental capacities (pp. 110, 118). Batchelor therefore reads Wollstonecraft as attempting to both dismantle and rebuild hierarchies, encouraging the existence of a class whose menial work would support the intellectual work of the higher class; women, Wollstonecraft argued, should necessarily take part in both groups. Batchelor uses the eponymous heroine of The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria (1797) and her keeper/servant Jemima as the most literal examples of this model. However, Batchelor focuses on...

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