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

This enlightening study further undermines the already tottering doctrine of "separate spheres" in eighteenth-century Britain. By examining careers rather than only individual works of female writers, Schellenberg makes a powerful case for eighteenth-century women's participation in public life. She exposes the inadequacy of literary criticism or historiography that assumes female subordination as the fact of paramount importance, and she raises far-reaching critical and historical questions.

Schellenberg does not argue that female literary careers duplicated male ones. On the contrary, a conspicuous virtue of her book is its careful distinctions. Thus Sarah Fielding, a "woman of letters," can preserve an identity and imagine a career not fully professionalized, in contrast to the comparably prolific Charlotte Lennox, who saw herself and was widely seen as a professional writer. Sarah Scott deliberately obscured the extent of her literary production, in effect denying connection between her private and public life, through anonymity, pseudonymity, and disjunctive publication by various booksellers. She burned her own letters and virtually disappeared from literary view: Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785) mentions Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison, but neither links them nor names their author. Frances Sheridan positioned herself to comment on public issues; Frances Brooke consciously supported a specific political agenda. The young Frances Burney fashioned an artful persona as "author," purposefully separating herself from more amateurish female writers. Possibilities for female career-shaping, Schellenberg amply demonstrates, were multifarious.

Surveying women's careers, Schellenberg reminds us of the varied literary production that characterized them. Fielding not only wrote novels and that remarkable experimental fiction, The Cry; her contemporaries considered her especially distinguished for her translation of Xenophon. Lennox published a periodical, poetry, plays, and several translations, including a version of Shakespeare's sources, complete with critical commentary. Scott wrote history, as did Brooke, who also experimented with poetry, plays, and a periodical.

Like their male counterparts, then, these women, writing for money, responded to market realities. Reaction to their work in reviews, Schellenberg shows, often ignored their gender. Contrary to much recent critical assumption, women writers were not universally patronized or ignored. Reviewers sought in their work, as in men's, human insight, moral sensitivity, wit, and imaginative development. When a reviewer found such qualities, he praised them. Schellenberg does not, however, claim that women's literary careers proved easy. Female authors shared men's difficulties, and they might find them—well, more difficult. Lennox, with two children and an irresponsible husband, faced urgent economic problems, which she confronted on occasion by soliciting subscriptions without producing a volume to justify them. Sarah Fielding, an unmarried gentlewoman, also financially needy, relied on the kindness of friends. Burney used The Witlings to express her annoyance about the pressures of female amateurism.

Schellenberg not only describes women's literary careers, but also delineates and speculates about their cultural context. Her investigations include inquiry about the literary standards applied by eighteenth-century reviewers and about what she calls (borrowing the term from Clifford Siskin) "the Great Forgetting": the process by which female writers disappeared from the canon in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The standards of the eighteenth century, she argues, might provide useful suggestions for our own evaluations of early women writers, and "the Great Forgetting" offers a cautionary tale.

Previous accounts of how women became "forgotten" literary figures have stressed male efforts to regularize the canon. Schellenberg emphasizes the contributions women themselves made to the elimination of their predecessors. The famous Bluestocking correspondence of Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Carter (published in 1809) systematically denigrates Lennox, on moral grounds, and elevates Sarah Fielding. Burney claims male but not female precursors. Frances Brooke, purportedly complaining about the devaluation of women novelists, names not a single one. Even Reeve, who mentions numerous women in her genealogy of the novel, illustrates principles by which women might be "forgotten."

Such instances do not add up to...