Looking Forward, Looking Back: The New Scholarship on Women's Writing

Paula R. Backscheider, ed. Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century 'Women's Fiction' and Social Engagement (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Pp. 273. $46.00.

Paula Backscheider and John Richetti, eds. Popular Fiction by Women, 1660-1730: An Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Pp. 336. $95.00 cloth. $25.00 paper.

Josephine Donovan. Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). Pp. 176. $18.95.

Vivien Jones, ed. Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Pp. 320. $54.95. $19.95 paper.

Jacqueline Pearson. Women's Reading in Britain, 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Pp. 300. $59.95.

The books reviewed here represent a range of new and established scholars whose work has concentrated on women's writing in the eighteenth century. To read these works together leaves one with a sense of hope and excitement. These scholars debate and disagree, take different theoretical perspectives, bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on questions that may earlier have seemed played out. There is no better place to start than with Paula Backscheider's preface to Revising Women. She notes that contributors to this edited volume have a combined critical experience of more than seventy-five years, and that they have all been witnesses to and actors in one of the most momentous changes in modern literary criticism—the complete rethinking of the place of women writers in the canon. That is important, because Backscheider sees this collection as an exemplar of "the maturity of a discipline" (viii): both the moment when the feminist project of canon revision has come of age and produced full, rich accounts of women's writing and its place in the tradition, and also the first time that a generation of scholars can say that their life's work has been spent on women's writing. And, Backscheider argues, what the essays have in common is their methodology: a way of understanding the "social engagement" of the texts studied and the ways in which they are reflective of and constitutive of their culture. The aim of the collection as a whole is to demonstrate how fully women's writing participated in the crucial social and political questions of the day; the essays themselves are fewer and longer than is usual in such a collection—an opportunity for the essays to spread a little beyond what have become the normal restrictions of academic publishing.

Backscheider herself is represented by two essays, both of which continue her stated goal of placing male and female writers in conversation, rather than ghettoizing each into a traditionally hierarchized binary. Both essays take a fresh perspective on old arguments. In Backscheider's first essay, "The Novel's Gendered Space," she reconsiders the ongoing debate about how to rethink the novel as genre in order to understand women's place in it: ranging among writers of the 1720s (Defoe, Aubin, Barker, Haywood, Manley, Gildon), she takes a Bakhtinian perspective and argues that the novel genre came to be the dominant one because it creates an inherently dialogic liminal space between public and private, for example, or male and female, or criminal and respectable, which represents the voice of the Other and sets up the reader as judge between contesting discourses. In other words, she categorizes the novel as genre in such a way that the contributions of women writers are seen to be constitutive.

In her second essay, "The Rise of Gender as Political Category," Backscheider takes on Samuel Richardson's mythic reputation as a friend to women, arguing that Clarissa's death in fact simply reinforces the legitimacy of patriarchy while (in a sleight of hand move) it appears to be throwing the spotlight on women. Like the first, this essay asks readers to question an established assumption: in this case, the central...