Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement (review)

REVIEWS 617 Kaltz concludes her introduction by stressing the fundamental aim underlying Mme de Beaumont's work: "L'œuvre entière de Mme de Beaumont est portée par le souci d'améliorer l'éducation des filles, tant sur le plan des connaissances que sur le plan moral" (p. 78). By revealing Mme de Beaumont's role as an innovator in pedagogy for girls and the variety of her approaches to the subject, Kaltz renders an invaluable service to those interested in eighteenth-century pedagogy and literature. Clear, thorough, and well researched, this anthology is a useful tool which greatly expands our knowledge of this "unknown" writer who deserves much more attention on so many levels. Rosena Davison Simon Fraser University Paula R. Backscheider, ed. Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women 's Fiction" and Social Engagement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xiii + 273pp. US$39.95. ISBN 0-8018-6236-1. Revising Women is a collection of five essays by four well-known critics of the eighteenth century, who together "represent over seventy-five years of feminist scholarship" (p. vii). The editor, Paula Backscheider, takes pride in the maturity of the contributors: "There is a special joy in writing essays like these—essays that bring an entire career's worth of learning and thinking to bear on women, literature, and society" (p. viii). Such a sweeping statement leads one to expect essays which present grand overviews or revisionary interpretations, conclusions, and summations. Yet the preface ends rather modestly, "our essays make clear how much work still lies before us" (p. xiii), and not all the essayists can be said to bring in "an entire career's worth of learning" in their discussion. The essays are eclectic in subject matter, in approach, and in scope. Aside from the fact that they all deal with fiction written primarily by women, thematically there is very little that holds them together. Paula Backscheider's two essays focus on the first half of the eighteenth century—the period traditionally seen to be dominated by Richardson and Fielding. In "The Novel's Gendered Space," the stronger of the two essays, Backscheider contends that "the formative decade for the English novel was the 1720s ... and that it was dominated by Penelope Aubin, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and a few other novelists, most of whom were women" (p. 2). She argues that by the 1720s women writers "recognized prose fiction as a potentially powerful way to inform and persuade readers" (p. 4). What is somewhat disconcerting in this chapter is the confusion created by the use of the term "gendered space." Backscheider uses it both to mean her mainly gynocritical feminist approach and to referto feminocentric novels such as Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana. Including Defoe in this chapter and Richardson in the second chapter does somewhat alter one's initial understanding of the term "women's fiction." 618 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 What Defoe's works have in common with novels by Mary Hearne, Jane Barker, Delarivier Manley, and others is that they make space for the "other." This "other" is filled with women characters who make the text "dialogic" and "with heroines who came to represent ... revisonary, even revolutionary ideas—tropes of and for change" (p. 6). According to Backscheider, the reader in these novels is "cast in the space ofthejudge and feels in the presence ofa trial" (p. 16). As opposed to classic realist works, the text "is apprehended as a quite direct enactment of the social that simultaneously makes visual historical formations, articulates contradictions and unresolved problems in a community, gives access to the secret dreams, shames, and hatreds alive in the class and sex gender systems, and encourages the reader to interrogate the culture" (p. 15). Backscheider's insistence that male authors be read alongside female ones reveals some fascinating parallels among the authors, and her argument is sophisticated and lucid. A number of her conclusions, however, have been advanced by other scholars of the novel. For example, inscribed in the fiction of "marginal" and "resilient" authors such as Defoe and Haywood "is the pervasive rise of capitalism, the triumph of secularism, an address to a very wide range of...