Eighteenth-Century Women Writers And The Gentleman’s Liberation Movement: Independence, War, Masculinity, And The Novel, 1778-1818 by Megan A. Woodworth (review)

Nearly two decades ago, Claudia L. Johnson’s Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995) positioned Jane Austen along with other women writers from the late eighteenth century as radical reformers of the concept of English masculinity. ¹ Megan A. Woodworth’s fine work, Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and the Gentleman’s Liberation Movement, further advances the conversation begun by Johnson and demonstrates the continuing relevance of a critical lens that foregrounds issues of politics, social rank, and gender in the exploration of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s novel.

While Woodworth convincingly endorses Johnson’s position, her work is no mere repetition of her critical forerunner. Woodworth’s holistic approach to the historical and cultural constructions of masculinity in the novels of Frances Burney, Jane West, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and Austen is especially original and effective. Rather than simply considering the male characters in opposition to the female characters, Woodworth convincingly demonstrates the mutually constitutive nature of gender roles and their relationship to politics during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. A central tenet of Woodworth’s argument is that by redefining the concept of English masculinity during the period, the writers she considers were also able to reimagine women’s roles in society in both the public and private spheres. Tracing the often implicit connections among these authors in a primarily chronological fashion, Woodworth ultimately argues that their novels participate in a revolutionary “progressive revision of gentility, from the values of chivalry and landed civic humanist virtue to a professionalized emphasis on merit as the basis of gentlemanliness and the passport to independence” (p. 212). According to this logic, in their increasingly radical portrayal of the meritocratic qualities of the English gentleman, these novelists also simultaneously engage in a restructuring of both the public and private spheres, rendering the public social hierarchy more flexible and navigable for members of the professional classes and translating the private hierarchy of marriage from tyrannically patriarchal to egalitarian and companionate.

On the whole, Woodworth excels at crafting concise yet deeply detailed explorations of these novels by deftly balancing historical and contextual information with nuanced, informative close readings of the works themselves. This skill is clearly demonstrated in the introduction. Despite covering nearly a century in fewer than thirty pages, Woodworth offers a compelling overview of the literary and social conversation about the English gentleman as one that was dominated, at least in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, primarily by male writers. Focusing on the portrayal of “proper” masculinity in the works of Daniel Defoe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and especially Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Woodworth suggests that the “nature/nurture” debate surrounding the gentleman—whether he was born or bred—finds its mid-century resolution in the character of Sir Charles himself. In the years immediately preceding and following the American and French Revolutions, Woodworth suggests, women writers responded to and wrote back against the masculinist, Grandisonian model that ironically endorsed public equality alongside private tyranny.

Following this excellent overview, part one offers innovative readings of Burney’s Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782) in relation to ideological and actual wars of empire. Using Burney’s correspondence and journals, chapter one suggests that Burney positions the seemingly flat, bland hero of Evelina, Lord Orville, against failed models of masculinity—everyone from Captain Mirvan and Willoughby to Villars and Sir John Evelyn—who represent paternalism and imperialism. Woodworth argues that Burney aligns Orville with an alternative masculine identity typified by the likes of Captain Cook and the Tahitian Omai (figures Burney describes in her letters), both of whom serve as models that reject paternalism and imperialism and instead embrace “friendship, non-violence, and discovery” (p. 31). According to...