Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture ed. by Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport (review)

Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture includes twelve essays that rethink familiar models of and offer new approaches to critical thinking about nineteenth-century women’s involvement in economics. Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport include purely literary approaches, historical approaches, and essays that combine the two. Contributors analyze women as symbols of the economy and as living individuals consciously thinking through economic systems. This diversity is unified by a common theme, clearly articulated in the introductory essay by the editors and recapitulated in Regenia Gagnier’s afterword, about the aftermath of the nineteenth century. Challenging traditional assumptions, the collection aims to “explore women’s capacity to function as active economic agents” (25).

The opening of the collection focuses on authors who seek to complicate the pattern by which women have typically been associated with forms of exchange alternative to the marketplace. Two early essays address but also revise the concept of moral—as opposed to material—economy. Historian Kathryn Gleadle explores women’s responses to the food riots of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the diaries of Kathryn Plymley, which record her niece Jane’s decision “to deliberately limit her diet” in response to “the economic crisis unfolding around her” (35, 36). This religious but also physical reaction to a real economic crisis led to the girl’s death. Ilana M. Blumberg also analyzes women’s self-abnegation, arguing that in Romola (1862–63) George Eliot “offers sacrifice as a female form of exchange.” Yet, like Gleadle, Blumburg insists that such exchanges are not isolated from but “could embrace the inevitably transformative power of the marketplace,” particularly as it involves the sale of books like Romola, for which Eliot garnered the largest payment of her career (61).

Coming toward the end of the volume, Narin Hassan’s essay on British women travelers picks up the themes of the early essays by showing how the association between women and an ethics of caring for others could generate value in the marketplace. Recounting the doctoring that Isabel Burton and Lucie Duff Gordon practiced when they traveled with their husbands in Syria and Egypt, Hassan details the recompense these women received for these professional services in the form both of payment at the time and, later, in successful books detailing their experiences. Tara MacDonald also references the traditional associations of women with giving by citing anthropologist Annette Weiner’s Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (1992) to make her argument. But in Ellen Wood’s St. Martin’s Eve: A Novel (1866), MacDonald does not read women’s impulse to sacrifice or serve others, but rather their use of gossip, as an instance of “a ‘feminine’ economy, in contrast to the masculine dominion over commerce, employment, and trade” (181).

Women’s participation in the masculine economy has traditionally been associated with consumption as opposed to production, a topic three essays in Economic Women explore. Leslee Thorne Murphy shows that the association between women and consumerism that fuels the frequently mocking representation of bazaars in novels of the period could be put to political ends. In the case of the Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar, Harriet Martineau both wrote about political economy and contributed items to the bazaar, including the novel Dawn Island (1845)—“an idealized tale of free-trade, emancipation, imperial commerce, and gender cooperation” (58). Deanna K. Kreisel’s “Demand and Desire in Dracula” shows that the vampire’s consumption of products “that are replenished ‘naturally’” returns “to a Physiocratic fantasy of a self-sustaining, circular economic activity and thus … resolve[s] the central anxieties of the capitalist economic organization” (120). Gordon Bigelow’s “The Cost of Everything in Middlemarch” reads George Eliot as critiquing William Stanley Jevons’s theories of individual desire and consumption. While “Jevons argues that...