Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s by Eleanor Ty (review)

HUMANmES 153 margins. McGill-Queen's University Press is to be congratulated on the production of a handsome volume at a reasonable price. There are a few apparent errors such as the locating of Thavies Inn at Oxford rather than London, and renaming the printer Nathanial Butter as Butler. But these are exceptions which by no means vitiate the high standards achieved. Donne would have been pleased. This critical edition is a worthy contribution to Donne studies - so vigorous nowadays. But that is to say too little. More and more we are coming to see how Donne is so much more (and so much lnore enigmatic ) than the anthologized lyricist. The term 'The Age of Donne' now makes cogent sense. Raspa has provided both an accessible and a thoroughly learned entrance to what he calls 'a difficult monument in the history of ideas.' This does not make it an easy read, or an uproarious saga, but a welcoming invitation to the fit reader. (GRAHAM ROEBUCK) Eleanor Ty. Ul1sex'd RevoiutiOllaries: Five Wome'l Novelists of the 17905 University of Toronto Press. 207. $40.00, $18.95 paper Eleanor Ty's study is one more reminder that the 1790s is the most interesting decade in English cultural history. The decade begins with the Revolution in France, and ends with Napoleon; it marks, economically, the transition from preindustrial to industrial England. In the history of ideas, the period gave us Godwin's Political Justice, the anarchists' Bible; Paine's Rights of Man (with The Age of Reason in the wings); Wollstonecraft 's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the first really important feminist statement (and still one of the most comprehensive and vital); Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, the conservatives' Bible (the symbolic villain of Ty/s study); Malthus's even more influential Population essay - the artillery of reactionary political thought, and crucial for so many later cultural constructs, from the 1834 Poor Law to Darwin's Inatural selection' to sociobiology to neoclassical economics. Not only is the decade extraordinarily fertile, but also it puts in place the direction posts that continue to demarcate social and economic understanding of reality to this day. The ideas of the 1790s are not so far from the ideas of the 19908, and as Ty insists, the writers she has chosen to study possess a power to communicate with us that gives them a peculiar interest of their own. The decade also inaugurates an astonishing period for literature: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen; Gothic fiction (often pooh-poohed but incredibly influential); the 'sentimental' writers that Jerome McGann has lately brought to our attention; and novelists like those that Eleanor Ty explores in the present study (Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Charlotte 154 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Inchbald). The obvious question, then, is how they relate to their intellectual and literary environment: how do they fit into the period and what do they contribute to it? What is their ecological niche, so to speak? It is difficult to ask this question, especially in Canada, without thinking of the work of Gary Kelly, whose recent study Women, Writing, and Revolution inevitably invites comparison to Ty's new book - and Ty inevitably cites Kelly's work. Kelly's work descends from traditional history-of-ideas analysis, as practised in an earlier form by scholars like Crane Brinton. Kelly's key preoccupation is the notion of 'cultural revolution': the installation of the middle and professional class as the organizing framework of society. Kelly is an important scholar, but one finds a subtext of celebrating this cultural revolution, which so to speak brought the professionals to power, including the professional intelligentsia which produces books about the 17905. Ty, by contrast, shows little interest in revolution, in intellectual history, or in (celebrating) the middle-class framework of society: her tone is easier, lighter, and more sceptical, in keeping with the jouissance of her guides: the American feminists Chodorow and Gilligan, but above all Lacan and Kristeva. Thus Ty's key preoccupation is the notion that women are different that they think, write, and relate to one another in different ways from Inen; and she intends to show that...