The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (review)

Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox are the subjects of this book. If the reader only knows a title or two of any of these authors, Betty A. Schellenberg provides a compelling case for deeper reading in their oeuvres. This book addresses a problem in the recovery of female authors from the eighteenth century that resulted in the championing of subversive proto-feminists and the dismissal of apparently domestic, passive, and didactic writers. Schellenberg's point, however, is not that her set of writers, who have generally been cast into the domestic sphere, ought to be credited in those terms. Rather, she offers each as a case study of the ways critics have been blind to the actual complexity of the authors' literary histories. Instead of the now outdated model of separate spheres, Schellenberg explains their significance in terms of literary professionalism that opened up in the burgeoning print world of the middle eighteenth century.

This study draws on recent work on the literary professional of the late eighteenth century, including Clifford Siskind's The Work of Writing, and Frank Donoghue's Fame Machine, while it revises their views with respect to women writers. Like Harriet Guest's Small Change, Schellenberg insists that critics need to avoid making gender-based generalizations that obscure the importance of politics, class, and geographical location of the writers. The book nudges the discussion of the 'rise' of professionalism back several decades to the careers of authors publishing as early as the 1740s. She accomplishes this by establishing a useful set of sociological criteria for professionalism: in addition to earning financial remuneration for work, professionalism also involves 'structural and institutional aspects' such as the critical reviews and the Royal Literary Fund, 'as well as the professional's claims to offer a specialized set of skills to meet a defined need of society at large, and to be deserving of certain status and economic rewards as a result.' Schellenberg charts how this subset of female writers achieved respectable incomes and professional authorial identities through their own social, political, and literary negotiations.

The slender book covers a considerable range of information delivered with a light hand. Schellenberg situates Sheridan in the heady politics of patronage and patriotism of the Seven Years' War, arguing convincingly that Sidney Bidulph is not a story of extreme passive female suffering but an argument for disinterested, public female virtue. Similarly, Schellenberg places Brooke, often considered Canada's first novelist, in the political worlds of colonial government and the London theatre. By reading the nuances of Brooke's brand of 'Country Ideology,' Schellenberg traces the implications of the pastoral in a wide range of genres, from her novels and periodicals to her plays and operas. Scott provides an interesting contrast in her decision to use the various modes of anonymity available in the 'republic of letters' to shield her personal identity while she nonetheless strategically developed a professional career, moving up the literary hierarchy from novels to history. Schellenberg contrasts the careers of Fielding and Lennox, perhaps the two best-known writers of the set, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of completely different strategies of professional development available to women at this unique point in history: while Fielding chooses a more traditional path of patronage and social networks in the remote centre of Bath, Lennox contrives through professional strategies in the literary culture of urban London.

These case studies lead Schellenberg to consider how the different strategies of women writers might effect their placement in literary history at the moment of their success and in the succeeding generations of what Siskind calls 'the Great Forgetting.' In her analysis of such influential women intellectuals as Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter, as well as Clara Reeve and Frances Burney, Schellenberg raises the provocative possibility that women were not simply victims of the nineteenth-century erasure of female fame; they contributed directly to it.

This book exemplifies the benefits of revising...