Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel by Paula R. Backscheider (review)

Both original and provocative, Paula Backscheider’s new book is also deeply learned and comprehensive in its scholarship and in its boldly “revisionary” (her word) ambitions (p. 40). Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) was a celebrated poet and epistolary fiction writer, whose works were reprinted an astonishing number of times, more editions in fact through the eighteenth century than Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). She became a celebrity in her later years for her exemplary pious life as well as for her writings. Samuel Johnson praised her as the writer who had managed “to employ the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion.”¹ But her star has faded, to put it mildly, and as Backscheider complains, Rowe has been condescended to by literary historians as merely a pious poet and minor fiction writer, known to a few specialists but not read outside of those circles since her day for her epistolary fictions in four volumes, Letters Moral and Entertaining and Friendship in Death in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living (1728–32).

As she summarizes it in the conclusion of her book, Backscheider’s controversial thesis is that in these works Rowe “created a modern, novelistic discourse and characters and plots suffused in it,” and “she revolutionized prose fiction, especially amatory romances and the female bildungsroman” (p. 231). These assertions are supported through a series of chapters informed by Backscheider’s command of recent feminist-oriented criticism and literary history. Her scholarship is formidable, if at times somewhat distracting in its supererogatory fullness: nearly 800 endnotes for four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. Her attraction to unhelpful jargon is also often in view, as she speaks in confidently Foucauldian terms of Rowe’s “emphasis on women’s self-mastery” as “technologies of the self, devices and techniques that make possible the social construction of personal identity” (p. 43). I am puzzled by moments like this since Rowe presumably did not (could not) think in Foucauldian terms whereby the self is constructed by forces that come from within the culture rather than out of the individual and oppositional sensibility such as Rowe is rightly given great credit for. Indeed, on this same page where Michel Foucault is invoked, Rowe is described as a self-conscious champion of female agency: “She created for writers who followed her novels of steadfastness in contrast to the line of novels of resignation, submission, or stoicism” (p. 43).

I read Rowe’s works nearly fifty years ago when I was writing my dissertation, so it is difficult for me to judge just how valid Backscheider’s thesis is about Rowe’s centrality to the development of the English novel. Her arguments are certainly thorough (if somewhat repetitive and digressive) and persuasive—if, for me, not completely convincing. On her own terms, however, Backscheider makes a strong and confident, well-informed case for Rowe’s significance. Her terms involve what is essentially a recurring theme or emphasis in Rowe’s narratives of female characters’ self-assertion and purposeful development, which she locates with some justice as central to the themes of the emerging novel. That is to say, for Backscheider, Rowe’s short novels (novellas, really) rework amatory fiction about women in empowering and positive directions as she “exposes patriarchal and libertine opinions and behaviors as sources of misery and evil” (p. 57). The plots of many of Rowe’s Letters are certainly drawn from amatory fiction from the early years of the century, notably female resistance to parental greed in arranging marriage. I would concur with that judgment. Of course, such a plot is what drives Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). As Backscheider observes, Richardson even has his heroine write a letter to Lovelace referring to her “father’s house” that anticipates her death and heavenly translation, doubtlessly alluding to Rowe’s Friendship in Death.² Yet Richardson’s achievement in...