Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 by Ingrid Horrocks (review)

For a book about alienation, exile, loss, and failure, Ingrid Horrocks's Women Wanderers is a joy to read. Horrocks argues that women's writing about wandering in the long eighteenth century mirrors its thematic concerns in formal innovations, so that not only characters within their work but also the texts themselves wander, frustrating readers' expectations of reaching a point or a view. Concentrating on Charlotte Smith's poetry, especially The Emigrants (1793) and Elegiac Sonnets (1784), Ann Radcliffe's gothic fiction, Mary Wollstonecraft's travel writing, and Frances Burney's final novel, The Wanderer (1814), Horrocks brings together insightful literary analysis with recent developments in mobility studies to reflect upon how these authors represent the figure of the woman wanderer in texts that have been criticized for wandering themselves. Instead of apologizing for the wandering form of her selected texts, she makes the formal choices of Smith, Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, and Burney the focal points of her analyses. For example, Horrocks reads Wollstonecraft's A Short Residence (1796) not as an aesthetic failure, offering up hopefulness only to end in despair, but as developing an aesthetics of failure: enacting on a formal and thematic level the difficulty of living and writing in a new way. The bleakness of the final letters in Wollstonecraft's travelogue are reconsidered as resisting the conventional comfort of a return to home, with Wollstonecraft instead questioning the relationship between women and the domestic. This argument is superb: melding together persuasive close reading with a sophisticated methodology in order to realign our understanding of a challenging text, creating victory from what seems like defeat. Similarly, Burney's long, mazy sentences are reread, not as stylistic failings, but as syntactical representations of the ways in which the action of the novel raises only to shut down choice for her nameless, rootless heroine. Horrocks's close readings, drawing explicitly on mobility scholarship and more implicitly on the findings of the new formalism, offer innovative ways to appreciate women's writing of the Romantic period.

Women Wanderers begins with a chapter on prospect poems by James Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Cowper before turning to Smith's The Emigrants (1793), in part to underscore the difference between these earlier eighteenth-century poets, men who claimed for themselves an elevated, authoritative, implicitly masculine view of the world, and Smith, who de-centres and destabilizes the centrality of this figure to emphasize the marginality not only of her cast of French refugees but also of her speaker's own contingent position in relation to English society. Paradoxically, Horrocks also wants to claim Smith and the other women writers she studies as grounded in the eighteenth century, in opposition to the Romantic period and its emphasis on mobility as liberty. Smith, as well as Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, and Burney, are responding to essentially eighteenth-century concerns, aligned with a different tradition from the Wordsworthian wanderers of Romanticism, according to Horrocks. I do not disagree that these writers differ from Wordsworth and his wandering avatars, who appear in a brief coda to Women Wanderers. However, they also seem at odds with the eighteenth-century tradition traced by Horrocks in the early sections of her book. Romantic studies, and Romantic-period wandering, is a more capacious category than Wordsworth's wanderers. To what extent do Horrocks's women wanderers share characteristics with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, doomed to a terrifying form of repetitive compulsion in his own wandering poem, or John Keats's collection of doomed knights and wights? Or, to avoid a simplistic gender binary, how do they compare with the marginal figures in the poetry of later Romantic figures such as Felicia Hemans or Laetitia Elizabeth Landon? Horrocks's reduction of the Romantic period to Wordsworth—with some mention of Byron—avoids these questions.

Romantic studies has moved beyond a focus solely on Wordsworth and other canonical poets such as Byron, Coleridge...