The Family, Marriage, And Radicalism In British Women’s Novels Of The 1790s: Public Affection And Private Affliction by Jennifer Golightly (review)

As Jennifer Golightly points out in this concise and valuable book, the 1790s was a “peculiar moment in British history” when radical activity and ideals briefly flourished before giving way to a “furious backlash” (p. 6). The backdrop was the French Revolution, which began in 1789 and produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) that championed the “natural and imprescriptible rights of man” to “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” ¹ The French Revolution was hardly the earliest or only source of such idealism; a century earlier John Locke wrote that “Man being born … to perfect Freedom” has the right to “Life, Liberty, and Estate,” and decades later, the American Revolution enjoyed considerable popularity in England. ² Nevertheless, the French Revolution was obviously the central impetus for English radicalism in the 1790s. After the storming of the Bastille and the Women’s March on Versailles in 1789, Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790-91), in which he opposed the French Revolution, feared its effects in England, and anticipated the horror to come. Reflections on the Revolution in France prompted an outpouring of pro-revolutionary sentiment, famously captured in Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791). Echoing the French and American Declarations, Paine declared that “all men are born equal, and with equal natural right,” and he hoped and expected that “other revolutions [would] follow” in England and around the world. ³ Such optimism was short lived. In 1793, the Reign of Terror began and England was at war with France. The British government, “thoroughly frightened, embarked on a course of ferocious repression and persecution,” which included the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. ⁴ By the end of the decade, England’s pro-revolutionaries had been quieted.

From a literary perspective, the 1790s were unique in producing the “radical novel,” a distinct category of fiction based on revolutionary ideals and the vision for social reform. Both male and female radicals gravitated to the genre, including Robert Bage, Eliza Fenwick, William Godwin, Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism, Golightly focuses on the books by women, which, she argues, are much more pessimistic about the practical success of the radical project than books by men. Like their male counterparts, female radicals supported the call for universal rights. However, at a time when women had limited access to property ownership, when the laws of coverture effectively made wives their husband’s property, and when mothers had no legal claim to child custody, female novelists had good reason to doubt that the rights of man would extend to them. On the one hand, their novels depict domestic life and the family as the most hopeful arena for enacting reform. On the other hand, what is “most striking about these depictions is their ultimate failure” (p. 2).

Wollstonecraft outlines both this hope and its obstacles in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In their present state, she argues, most women are as bad as aristocrats. Instead of developing their minds, women overvalue their external assets and inherited privileges; beauty and sexuality are for them what land and status are for aristocrats, and none of this is a source of merit or morality. The cure for women, Wollstonecraft promises, is education. Were they taught to be rational and to develop their minds, women would become their husbands’ intellectual companions and marriage could form the basis of a new and more equitable society based in reason.

The problem, of course, is that this was a pipe dream. As Golightly notes, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman served “as the basis for the ideological agenda of the novels” by radical women (p. 45...