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  • Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727 by Karen Bloom Gevirtz
  • Kristin M. Girten
Gevirtz, Karen Bloom. Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. x + 247 pp. $95.00 hardcover.

With Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727, Karen Gevirtz offers a thought-provoking contribution to the ongoing inquiry into the influence of the new science on literature of the Enlightenment era. Specifically, Gevirtz focuses on how early British women novelists engaged debates fueled by the new science “about the nature of the human capacity for knowledge and the appropriate language for representing that knowing self” (1). Surveying works by Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Davys, Gevirtz explores how such debates helped shape narrative practices within the early novel.

In chapter one, Gevirtz sides with scholars who have characterized the philosophic self of the British Enlightenment as a “stable self,” “distinguishable and detachable from its context” (16–17). Though this chapter would have been strengthened by a consideration of the serious challenges some scholars have recently begun to pose to the detachment and stability of this self, it nevertheless provides an appropriate foundation for the rest of the book, which seeks to explore how this self inspires the early British novel. It also offers an important rationale for Gevirtz’s decision to focus solely on works by women authors. As Gevirtz observes, “if epistemology valorized the isolated individual (the man) then the individual who could not or ought not exist as an isolated entity (the woman) was removed from the systems of knowledge production” (29). Gevirtz suggests that the authors her book addresses used the novel as a site for engaging these gendered epistemological implications of the new science, and their works are thus “particularly useful for recognizing the debates and the role of the debates in shaping structures that came to underpin the novel as a genre” (34). [End Page 270]

In chapter two, Gevirtz turns to Aphra Behn, arguing that Behn challenges the stability of the philosophic self on which the new science relied by emphasizing its constructed and performative nature. Chapter three considers Jane Barker, whose fiction, according to Gevirtz, insists upon the unreliability of the single self while “demand[ing] respect for the unknown” and highlighting “epistemological indeterminacy” (85, 89). Though one might wonder why Gevirtz neglects to consider the relevance of Locke’s emphasis on evidentiary corroboration to Barker’s narrative techniques, she nevertheless makes a convincing case for the distinctiveness of Barker’s use of frame narratives to “advocate...a collectivist epistemology for maximizing knowledge” as an alternative to more individualist methods of knowledge production (74).

With the final two chapters, Gevirtz proceeds to “examine the works of authors exploring the relationship between an autonomous self and its larger context, particularly its moral context, in the creation of knowledge” (102). Whereas, according to Gevirtz, Behn and Barker fundamentally dispute the notion of a detached stable self, the final two authors she discusses—Haywood and Davys—lend some credence to such a self. In chapter four, “The Detached Observer,” Gevirtz argues that Eliza Haywood advocates “a balance between detachment and incorporation as an epistemological desideratum” (102). The reader may not be fully convinced that Haywood maintains this delicate balance quite as easily or consistently as Gevirtz suggests. However, her central point that, as Haywood “tests the limits of social thinking and individual thinking,” she “rejects the relegation of women, their bodies, their experience, and the knowledge that comes from the combination of those forces, to the margins” is a good one, if not all that new (105, 126). With chapter five, Gevirtz considers the novels of Mary Davys, asserting that “Davys’s narrators present an image of the ideal natural philosopher, if not the ideal self, at work” (129). While Gevirtz characterizes Davys’s “mediation” of the “detached point of view” and the “integrated point of view” as innovative (143), how exactly her vision of reliable knowledge production differs from that of Bacon and Locke warrants further exploration. Ultimately, though, this chapter offers a satisfying conclusion as it acknowledges that, in “creating a self who is internally morally invested but narratively...

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