Elinor James (review)

Ashgate has been establishing itself for some years now as a leading publisher of Early Modern English texts, and this volume of the works of Elinor James provides a fine addition to the corpus. The colour portrait of the author, reproduced as a frontispiece, shows an elegant woman, dressed in the latest style of the times and asserting her literary connections by balancing her hands on one substantial volume while another book lies open on the table beside her. Elinor James was a feisty English woman who lived through the turbulent times of the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth and is unusual in being both a printer and a writer who produced more than 90 pieces of work addressing issues current in her time. Married to a printer and raising several children, she nevertheless found time and opportunity to express her opinions as to how England was being governed. She lived through the succession of six different monarchs, petitioned all of them, and claimed to have had audiences with three. Her writing career spans over three decades and provides an interesting view on major events such as the Revolution of 1688, the Union of England and Scotland in 1707 and the Jacobite uprisings of 1715-16. In 1689 she was imprisoned in Newgate for disseminating seditious literature and she had another brush with the law in 1702. After her husband's death in 1710 she gained control of his library and eventually donated over three thousand books to Sion College. She seems to have enjoyed conflict and debate and was active up to her death in 1719 in charitable bequests and legal wrangling.

Paula McDowell has provided a thorough and scholarly introduction to the hitherto neglected corpus of this Early Modern woman writer which includes biographical material as well as an assessment of James as a political pamphleteer and an analysis of the reception of James's texts. A bibliography of primary and secondary sources relevant to any further study of James is also provided.

This is a handsomely produced volume with the original material clearly and carefully reproduced in facsimile. The layout, pagination and printing style of James's petitions and letters has not been tampered with and the size of this book makes all the print easy to read – a bonus for those of us used to poring over such tracts in dim and dusty libraries. The material is arranged in chronological order and each document starts on a new page and is followed by details about where the original manuscript is to be found. This layout is admirably clear and preferable to endless notes at the back. All the works by James are listed in a numbered table of contents which makes specific items easy to find and an appendix contains anonymous and un-attributed material and responses to James. Although databases such as EEBO (Early English Books Online) provide such material electronically there is no substitute for a well-edited collection on paper.

James appears to have been a late starter as an author for her first effort is dated 1681 and so we cannot add her view of the Restoration with that provided, for instance, by Pepys. Her own writing covers a wide range of issues. As a printer she was concerned with legislation affecting the trade. She writes about the intricacies of voting in City and parliamentary elections and often gets embroiled in religious controversy. She is continually concerned with vindicating the 'true Church of England' in pious and strident language and defending it against popery and dissenters. Readers who look for social comment on items such as dress or gossip about personalities of the time will be disappointed and perhaps it is this lack of a personal view of the world which has led to James's neglect. There is little that can be gleaned here about the actual lives of women, for...