Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (review)

There is much to like about this book. Glover has taken up an important and under-studied topic: the relation among owning, real property, and gender. It could be said to be a belated literary adaptation of Susan Staves's ground-breaking Married Women's Separate Property, applying the insights of Staves's legal study to a series of imaginative authors. With its focus on real property, Engendering Legitimacy offers a useful corrective to the rash of new economic criticism, and its obsession with credit. Despite the vast expansion in types and uses of instruments of credit across the period, Glover is quite right to stress that through Blackstone legal theory and practice centred on land and not chattel or credit. In subject, Engendering Legitimacy comes closest to Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property, in which Wolfram Schmidgen focuses on discourses of ownership. Glover's study is well-informed, intelligent, and (not the least of its virtues) written in a forceful, lively, engaging style too often absent from academic prose.

In format, Engendering Legitimacy is relatively conventional, with a brief introduction explaining its approach, the requisite chapter of historical contextualization (a quite useful overview of the laws governing real property in the late early-modern period), followed by four chapters on four different authors: Jonathan Swift, Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, and Eliza Haywood. Despite the lack of explanation of the principles of selection (are they typical or anomalous; why Swift and why not Manley?), they prove to be sufficiently different to illuminate various aspects of the relation between women and owning. Each of the four author chapters follows the same pattern: a biographical introduction tracing the outlines of career, followed by an interpretation of selected works focusing of the themes of property and possession, concluding with a brief summary of the theoretical principles on display. The readings run from canonical pieces (Tale of a Tub, Roxana) to some much more obscure and intriguing work by Davys and Haywood. The literary analysis is well done, albeit too brief to fulfil the opening promise: "It is the intention of this study to unravel the text of property and prose fiction in early eighteenth-century England" (20). This is a tall order, and, while admirably ambitious, is not entirely possible to fill in a study that focuses on real property to the exclusion of credit on the one hand, and contract theory on the other, the twin pillars of the bridge in early modern studies between cultural analysis and political theory. C.B. Macpherson and J.G.A. Pocock, who figure so prominently in the work on fungible property ("portable property" to Dickens's Wemmick), play only walk-on roles here.

While it is churlish to complain of ambition, the purview of Engendering Legitimacy is simply too broad to underwrite a completely convincing argument. Property and possession, the two foci of attention here, are so abstract that it would be hard to come up with English fiction that is not concerned with them. If the focus is on "issues of law, marriage, and the questionable legitimacy of women's claims to property" (91), this would hold for all of Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Radcliffe, Wollstonecraft, Scott, the Brontës, Eliot, Collins, and so on, not to mention Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Zola. To find these themes in four early eighteenth-century writers reveals little of the period, when pretty much all prose fiction revolves around inheritance and possession. That these issues are ubiquitous of course does not invalidate any study of them, but it does necessarily place a heavy premium on the specificity of historical argument: what, exactly, is it about late early-modern concerns with property and gender that shows up fiction?

In the end, it is not entirely clear what kind of history is deployed here, for this study oscillates between old and new historicism. Engendering Legitimacy looks new historicist, with an interdisciplinary approach joining literary analysis...