Exemplary Women

This is a brave and ambitious book, making a strong case for the importance of the exemplary role claimed by eighteenth-century Anglican women writers. It contains a great deal of fascinating material on a wide range of subjects, but the author could have done more to make it accessible and to clarify what she wants the reader to learn from it. Too much has been packed in, and some of her decisions about coverage and presentation are unhelpful.

In the introduction, Major states that her subject is "how narratives of faith, national identity, and civilisation allowed some women to see themselves as active agents in the shaping of the nation" (1). Britannia, female emblem of the virtuous Protestant nation, was linked to the Church of England, also frequently personified as female: membership of the established church gave a particular group of women a voice and an identity as speakers for Christian charity, morality, and patriotism. The key figures in the book, whom Major for good reasons dislikes labeling as Bluestockings (81-84), are the Anglicans Elizabeth Montagu, her sister Sarah Scott, their friends Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Carter, and Hannah More, and, to a lesser extent, the Dissenter Anna Laetitia Barbauld. They are viewed through their private correspondence (of which Major has made excellent use) and their published writings. In addition, there are effective accounts of Hester Lynch Piozzi, Sarah Trimmer, and, more briefly, of the Bowdler sisters, Elizabeth and Henrietta Maria. Major also makes brief and less illuminating reference to a number of other significant women who had complicated relations with the Church of England (such as the Countess of Huntingdon and Mary Fletcher) or who dissented from it.

The book's enclosing dates, the meaning of which is not immediately obvious from the title, refer to two publications: John Arbuthnot's The History of John Bull (1712), in which Bull's mother is the Church of England, and Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), in which she laments what has become of Britain. In fact, the chapters, which are on the whole arranged chronologically, go back to Elizabeth I and to the formation of Britannia as an icon, and look forward to Charlotte Yonge and Margaret Oliphant in the nineteenth century as well as to the status of women clergy in the Church of England now. The Female Chartists of Manchester in 1841 are given the last word. Major's topics include the changing depictions of Britannia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Protestant nunneries and female communities as treated in Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54), Thomas Amory's John Buncle (1756, 1766), and Scott's Millenium Hall (1762); charity and its problems in the 1770s and 1780s; and responses by women of different denominations to France and to the French Revolution.

The best parts of the book are those in which Major deals in detail with her key issues: for example, attitudes to Talbot (in chapter 2, "Performing Madam Britannia and the Blessing of Example"); the importance of charity schools and Sunday schools (in chapter 5, "The Politics of Paradise: Insurrection, Sunday Schools, and Elizabeth Vesey's Dragon"); Piozzi's role as biblical commentator and prophet (in chapter 7, "The Contrast I: Serpents, Rocks, and the Gates of Hell"); and More's clerical tone in her later writings (in chapter 8, "The Contrast II: Bruising the Serpent's Head, the Little Sister, and Christian Professions"). Major objects that the religious dimension of literary and polite culture in the eighteenth century has been overlooked, and that "there still lingers in academic circles an embarrassment and suspicion" about this dimension (16). As someone who has been writing for years about religious literature in this period, I think she overstates the point, but she is absolutely right to focus on the way her key figures saw religion, politics, ethics, and writing as intimately connected.

One of the strengths of Major's approach is that she is alert to differences in the religious allegiances of her figures: thus, she makes...