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  • The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and Byronism by Caroline Franklin
  • Anna Camilleri
The Female Romantics: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists and Byronism. By Caroline Franklin. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 253. ISBN 978 0 4159 95412 978. £80.00.

Much anticipated by the Byron community, Caroline Franklin’s latest study considers the response of women’s fiction to Byron, both in relation to his poetry and to the myth of ‘Byronism’. Franklin does not merely chart an ‘influence’ study – she remains keenly aware throughout of the ways Byron’s own work can itself be seen to interact with contemporary women’s writing. Bookended by the death of Wollstonecraft in 1797, and the publication of John Stuart Mill’s (and Harriet Taylor’s) The Subjection of Women in 1869, Franklin offers a convincing alternative historical framework though which one can read the Byronic legacy alongside a narrative of protofeminism.

The study may well be considered the first major contribution to the reclamation of Byron for researchers and students of gender since Susan Wolfson’s Borderlines (2006), and Franklin’s own Byron’s Heroines (1992). In addition, the book is further in dialogue with recent work examining Byron’s cult legacy and fan culture by Ghislaine MacDayter, Tom Mole, and Corin Throsby. Engaging as it does with two major cross-currents of Byron scholarship, the book would be of interest to dedicated Byronists, as well as to students and scholars working in any aspect of nineteenth-century gender studies. The Female Romantics is a timely piece of research that should be considered as an invitation to scholars to engage more closely with the possibilities Byron’s literary relations with women hold. [End Page 71]

The study is formed of seven chapters that move in roughly chronological fashion through ten female writers of English, Irish, French and American origins. Franklin provides us with a selection of ‘Female Romantics’ with which to read Byron, from contemporaries such as Jane Austen (Chapter 5) and Madame de Staël (Chapter 1), to intimates such as Caro Lamb (Chapter 3) and Mary Shelley (Chapter 2), to continental Romantic George Sand (Chapter 3), the belated Romantics Anne and Charlotte Brontë (Chapter 5 and 6 respectively), and the Transatlantic Romanticism of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Chapter 7). In the introduction, the absence of Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning is excused owing to exigency of space and existing ‘nuanced accounts’. Such omission is further explained by Franklin’s own definition of ‘Romantic’ for the purposes of the study, as being a label more resonant of romance narratives than of capitalised Romanticism. That these narratives swiftly dominated popular literary culture is central to Franklin’s emphasis on the romance rivalry that existed between male and female writers in an increasingly competitive (and lucrative) literary marketplace.

The opening chapter, ‘Aristocratic Romanticism’, begins by considering the influential Della Cruscan circle, and the artistic and political appeal Italy had for liberal-minded Brits in exile. The bulk of the chapter explores Madame de Staël and Byron as ‘internationalists and tourists’, hostile to the static domesticity of their own cultures. Stressing the importance of Italy’s ‘feminocentric culture’ for Byron and his female respondents, the chapter concludes by examining the international literary salon of Lady Morgan, which serendipitously ran in close coincidence with Byron’s own career, from 1812 to 1837. Significantly, this first chapter suggests that the kind of response to Byron the study is most intrigued by is Byromania rather than any kind of detailed literary Byronism.

The second chapter is the one of greatest interest for scholars of Romanticism, being primarily concerned with the Byronic legacy inherited by Mary Shelley’s prose fiction. It is also a chapter in which Franklin’s decision to prioritise the myth of Byronism over the poetry is revealed to have certain limitations. For example, in her detailing of the identification of Napoleon with Prometheus by ‘countless European writers and artists’, readers might expect explicit reference to be made to the following lines from the closing stanza of Byron’s ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’ (1814):

Or, like the thief of fire from heaven, Wilt thou withstand the shock? And share with...

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