Revamping Literary History

Both books under review here are about women writers of the eighteenth century: Susan Carlile's edited collection, Masters of the Marketplace, focuses on four from the 1750s—Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, and Sarah Fielding—and Jennie Batchelor, in her Women's Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750-1830 compares the women authors of this decade to those later in the century. Carlile's collection insists on how professionally successful these writers women were, and how influential in determining the direction of the novel. Batchelor investigates how women thought about their literary labors and how these perceptions evolved over the course of the century. Both books seek to augment traditionally male-centered literary history and to provide new ways of understanding the contribution of gender to the construction of the novel.

Batchelor's Women's Work looks closely at the careers and texts of Sarah Scott, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft, asking how they presented their authorship in a context in which, increasingly, genteel women were expected not to work. How did they construct heroines who were "born to leisure but compelled to work" (6)? Batchelor includes a final chapter devoted to petitioners to the Royal Literary Fund which further illustrates how women writers thought of themselves at the end of the century, or at least how they packaged their achievements and ambitions for this charity.

Each of the writers Batchelor examines construed her authorship differently, partly as a result of different individual circumstances but also in response to changes in literary culture. Sarah Scott, in the 1750s, projected women's authorship as a gift to the world. More than any other women writer, including Sarah Fielding, says Batchelor, Scott defended the work they did as "individually enfranchising and culturally necessary" (25): "Whether it is Cornelia in the brothel offering her story to a rakish would-be client who will be her devoted servant from that moment on, or Sabrina, in an inversion of the Scheherazade myth, attempting to save her mistress through the telling of tales, or Mrs. Alton performing the work of gratitude in relating her story to Ellison, the act of narration is presented in Scott's novels as a force for good" (63).

For Charlotte Smith, authorship was a means to self-possession, a way to assert "'property' in her texts and her person" (103). Batchelor argues that Smith created the image of herself as a long-suffering wife of a ne'er-do-well who took her earnings, forced to write novels to support her children. Smith projected the effort involved in maintaining a literary career in order to seem a reluctant author, driven by necessity to produce novels. She also insisted on the physical effort of the work, that it was not just the effusions of genius. In the decades during which Smith was writing, Batchelor reminds us, literary careers were being professionalized (as can be seen in debates over copyright and the rise of literary reviews) as well as masculinized. Smith's response to this cultural shift was to emphasize in her prefaces, footnotes, and semi-autobiographical plots the domestic labor that "both occasioned and impeded her literary career" (91), and to insist upon what hard work it all was.

By the time Wollstonecraft was writing, although "labor" had become a central term in political commentary, women's exclusion from professional work made it harder to refer to their own textual production as such. Increasingly marginalized within the labor market, women's expected place in the national economy was reduced to that of consumers or commodities themselves, rather than productive laborers. Wollstonecraft accordingly called for "women to be allowed more meaningful—that is to say, more economically viable and more socially useful—roles within the division of labour" (115). But by focusing on intellectual labor, Batchelor says, Wollstonecraft privileged the work of middle-class women at...