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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 64.3 (2003) 393-396



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British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820. By Devoney Looser. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 272 pp.

The odds are good that even readers unacquainted with Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey will have encountered the description of historical study proffered by its heroine. Catherine Morland's account of her chagrin when confronting "real, solemn history" has been almost ritualistically invoked by feminist historians (as Devoney Looser demonstrates in an intriguing outline of how histories of the last quarter century have used this heroine's pronouncements). Her complaints have been heralded as evidence of the long-standing androcentrism of historians—and as evidence of Austen's prescient approval of the feminists who recently have critiqued it. For Catherine is supposed to speak for both her author and female readers of all periods when she laments that in history she finds only "the quarrels of popes and kings . . . ; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all."1

In British Women Writers and the Writing of History Looser aims, through careful archival investigation, to remedy the misperception that informs this account of Austen's attitude toward historical discourse. She argues with the premise that, prior to the advent of second-wave feminism and the "herstory" that identified Catherine as its muse, history was a male preserve enrolling "hardly any women at all." On the contrary, Looser contends: the writing of history was central to early modern women's authorship. Looser supplements her redescription of the works of Austen's foremothers with a second, bolder contention: women's writing proved central to the discursive transformations that, during the eighteenth century, dissociated the act of historical retrospection from political partisanship and antiquarian pedantry and thereby made history into a discourse whose scholarly and scientific credentials were secure. "Women did not stand by and watch these changes occur," Looser proposes, after describing history's gain in respectability. Instead, women writers "participated, tangentially and head on, in debates about history writing that effected change" (3). Reconstruction of the complex terms in which that participation occurred is one announced aim of Looser's accounts of Lucy Hutchinson's memoir of the English Civil War (composed 1671), Catharine Macaulay's History of England in Letters (1778), and Hester Lynch Piozzi's strange blend of personal reminiscence and world history, Retrospection (1801).

A few earlier studies, undeterred by the claims of novelty tendered by the practitioners of "herstory," did engage these women historians, mainly [End Page 393] as lonely trailblazers. Looser, by contrast, portrays a context in which engagement with history could prove, for eighteenth-century women, a prudent career move—all the more so because, as the relation between historiography and the historian's experience shifted, notions of expertise came to rest less on "participation in 'public life'" (21) and more on knowledges and rhetorical skills that even these women might acquire. To support her argument about the attractions—the accessibility and manipulability—female authors found in historiography, Looser combines close readings of Hutchinson, Macaulay, and Piozzi with accounts of the significance that historiography possessed for a trio of writers—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, and Austen herself—whom literary scholarship has artificially segregated from the historical enterprise. Taken together, Looser's seven chapters make a persuasive case for locating women's authorship in a broader field of writing than usual. They suggest, too, how much we miss when we project our sense of generic boundaries and our anachronistically narrow definitions of "history" onto the past. For instance, Lennox, much discussed for her contribution to the development of the novel, looks different when, prompted by Looser, one considers the translation of Voltaire's Age of Lewis XIV that Lennox undertook while composing The Female Quixote and the research she did afterward for a history of "The Age of Queen Elizabeth."

Certainly, the texts Looser considers bear little formal or topical resemblance to the works by Hume and Robertson that are typically privileged by historians of history. For...

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