A Canon of Our Own

It should be no surprise that the authors of two recent and groundbreaking histories of eighteenth-century women writers are also renowned mentors. Both Paula Backscheider, author of Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry (2005), and Susan Staves understand that novice readers thirst for guidance, especially regarding an expanding group of writers whom critics have hesitated to rank. Both exemplify the teacher-scholar ideal that many more academics extol than practice. Both provide guides to a field that has expanded dramatically with perhaps insufficient effort to define its traditions or aesthetic criteria. As Staves indicates in her introductory chapter, feminist critics have been reluctant to exclude some women writers from serious discussion, especially writers who had disappeared for close to three hundred years before recent efforts unearthed them. Many scholars have argued that it is precipitate to establish a canon of eighteenth-century women writers until more texts are accounted for and more studies and debates have been conducted. Others have adopted a cultural-studies approach that deems all kinds of texts equally eligible for literary analysis. To such objections, Staves responds that it is time feminist scholars, in particular, claim the authority of their expertise and produce a literary history that not only relates women writers to cultural and political history, but also makes aesthetic distinctions about their achievements. Staves's judgments are bound to stir contention, since her opinions sometimes counter the prevailing estimates, but she has initiated what is sure to be a lively controversy over the relative merits of our literary foremothers.

Having been a graduate student at Brandeis in one of the earliest classes Staves taught on eighteenth-century women writers, I can attest to her longstanding devotion to their recovery and study. It is to the excitement of participating in Staves's quest—in being, for example, among the first readers in two centuries of Ann Masterman Skinn's The Old Maid; or, The History of Miss Ravensworth (1771)—that many scholars like me owe our careers. That particular novel is an instance of Staves's ability to make firm judgments about which works by women deserve canonical status. Her students in 1978, I recall, found The Old Maid very appealing due to its spunky heroine, who leaps from the second-story window of a would-be abductor's house and stabs another assailant with a pair of sewing scissors. Staves cautioned us against preferring a work so unrealistic and a heroine whom contemporaries found unpalatable. Although Staves later traced Mrs. Skinn's unfortunate marital history, she evidently refrained from altering her judgment about the novel's value in order to enshrine its author in her history. Thus, Staves cannot be accused of promoting works she personally revived. Although she involved countless students over the years in editing, writing critical introductions to, and scrutinizing texts that might otherwise have languished forever in rare book rooms or on reels of microfilm, Staves has exercised uncompromising principles of selection in determining and evaluating the writings included in her study. As she observes, forty years' experience seems sufficient preparation for discerning which writers achieved excellence while advancing women's literary history.

Staves divides her narrative into historic periods as they influenced, and were influenced by, women writers. The Restoration, for example, featured few women writers who dared to participate in the great public debates and movements of their era. In her first chapter, Staves examines why such women felt compelled to record and even publish their perspectives. Her second chapter coincides with the reign of William and Mary, when monarchical piety emboldened women writers to invoke Protestantism on behalf of women's educational and legal rights and in quest of their share of cultural influence. Her third chapter covers Queen Anne's highly politicized reign, when women promoted the merits of both Tory and Whig parties, or, alternatively, urged retreat from corrupting political concerns. Chapter 4 covers the early Hanoverian decades, when the court's literary...