Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (review)

Scholars of women's writing will welcome the publication of this collection of essays— part of Cambridge University Press's Women and Literature series—as an important companion to such earlier works as Dorothy Mermin's Godiva's Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880 (1993). Like Mermin, the authors of Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 aspire to map networks of affiliation among female writers of the period, privileging the question of professionalism as they do so. Where Joanne Shattock and her contributors most productively depart from Mermin, however, is in the capaciousness of their project. Mermin's study "deals primarily with high culture and its environs [...] and pays little attention to kinds of writing (hymns, conduct books, political pamphlets, most periodical literature) that were defined as outside the world of high culture" (xviii). Shattock's contributors place no such limit on their investigations. In her chapter on women and the theater, Katherine Newey offers the astonished observation that "on surveying the range of women playwrights over the nineteenth century, it is as if a whole school of new work by women has been 'discovered', and there are now some 500 new authors who must be incorporated into our understanding of women's writing in the nineteenth century" (195). So too, Virginia Blain concludes her overview of primarily middle-class women's poetry with the promise that "a number of other lesser-known working class poets are gradually coming to light as researchers turn their attention to the newspaper archives" (184). Shattock and company focus on more occasion-specific and decidedly minor works than does Mermin, excavating a vastly under-studied cultural landscape. The results of their industry in the archives fairly promise to alter our perceptions of nineteenth-century, and more specifically, Victorian women's literary culture.

Unwittingly, feminist historians have often tended to reconfirm what Virginia Woolf declared to be self-evident in A Room of One's Own (1929): "Here then, one had reached the early nineteenth century. And here, for the first time, I found several shelves given up entirely to the works of women. But why, I could not help asking, as I ran my eyes over them, were they, with very few exceptions, all novels?" ([Harcourt, Brace, 1957]: 69). Shattock proposes a critical about-face. Appropriately enough, given a shift in emphasis away from novels to multiple print genres, the towering figures of George Eliot and the Brontës do not overshadow the richly peopled chapters that follow. Elisabeth Jay's work on religious discourse, for instance, situates the usual luminaries alongside Hannah More, Florence Nightingale, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge. Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are all accounted for as common participants in the cultural activities that engaged many of their contemporaries. What remains tantalizingly unclear once one has confronted the sheer numbers of Victorian women who distinguished themselves as reviewers, biographers, playwrights and theater managers, autobiographers, poets, popularizers of science or political economy, editors, and translators, is how women's work as novelists came to stand in for all this writing. Where did the argument originate that women naturally—and exclusively—excelled as novelists?

Some of the strongest chapters in this volume draw the reader's attention to ways in which women of the period were instrumental not only in shaping a variety of literary discourses, but in changing the climate of literary production itself. Jay surveys the plethora of texts produced by women eager to participate in religious discourse, Barbara Caine concentrates on women's interventions in public debates through the periodical press and journalism, and Valerie Sanders focuses on the ingenious marketplace negotiations such writers as Oliphant conducted with (primarily male) publishers. What emerges from most of these essays is a concern with the professionalism that Judith Johnston and Hilary Fraser...