Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640-1705 by Penelope Anderson (review)

Friendship’s Shadows is a meticulously researched book that tells a new and compelling story about the adaption of classical ideals of friendship during the British Civil Wars and after the Restoration. The book focuses on two main writers, Katherine Philips and Lucy Hutchinson, uncovering their deployment of Ciceronian and Epicurean friendship to imagine models of political community that move beyond theories of patriarchal monarchy, social contract, or natural sociability. In doing so, it reveals how, in order to reimagine the fragile process of forging political allegiance in such a turbulent period, these women draw on a much neglected aspect of the traditions of civic friendship they deploy: betrayal. Anderson argues for the centrality of betrayal to the vexing question of the relation between the friends and the state: do the ethical and affective ties of friendship prepare friends for active public life? Or do these ties create a potentially treasonous relationship that competes or conflicts with the interests of the state? The book contributes to the growing body of work on early women writers’ active interventions in political culture, then, by demonstrating how attending to women writers radically changes what that culture looks like. It uncovers a new and vigorous, if ultimately repressed, theory of political association that emerges from the productive confluence of discourses of classical friendship and the vivid conflicts of civil war.

The book begins with an introduction that explains classical friendship, particularly the discourse of amicitia with its insistence on the loyalty of friends as both ideally founding and potentially undoing the civic obligations that uphold stable government. It then splits into two sections: in the first, Anderson shows Philips and Hutchinson foregrounding and elaborating on the multiple, competing public and private obligations inherent in friendship in order to negotiate the divided political duties generated during and after the British Civil Wars. In the second, she turns to analyzing how, after the Restoration, responses to and adaptions of both women writers split politics and friendship in ways that result in a new sense of friendship’s feminization and diminished political efficacy.

Chapter one lays the foundation for her discussion of the book’s two central figures by analyzing the pervasiveness of “political inconstancy” in this period through four male writers famous—or infamous—for their shifting allegiances: Marchamont Nedham, Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller, and Andrew Marvell (28). Though sometimes loose in its focus, the chapter sets up a rich backdrop for her analysis of Philips and Hutchinson. Key insights also emerge in the details, as when, for example, Anderson brilliantly recasts the problem of Marvell’s series of poems alternately praising and mocking Cromwellian figures. These politically contradictory poems have often, she argues, been wrongly presented as a “problem of sequence—how could Marvell write ‘An Horatian Ode’ and then ‘Tom May’s Death?’” They should rather, she shows, “be seen as a problem of simultaneity, the difficulty of sustaining multiple opposed obligations at once” (57). Chapter two develops a fascinating and original argument about Philips’s promotion of the betrayals of humanist friendship in order to apply a tension within couverture—in which the wife is simultaneously obligated to both her husband and the state—to the competing and shifting loyalties of Royalists during and after the civil wars. Chapter three is equally strong, as it argues that Hutchinson deploys Lucretian adaptions of Epicurean friendship to present spouses as friends and insist upon human vulnerability as both a “threat to” and “the motivation for founding a human society,” a society generated in the mutual ethical and affective risks of friendship (121).

Emphasizing Philips’s poems of betrayal and Hutchinson’s articulations of “pious fraud” (139), these central chapters develop two broad insights. First, Philips and Hutchinson define political allegiance as a fluid and resilient process: unlike the sudden and irrevocable political body created by the Hobbesian contract, that is, loyalties in these models can be...