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90 published under another titlein 1995,Ms. Backscheider focuses on courtship, conduct books, and power in Clarissa. (Ironically , she rarely referstowomen’sfiction of the 1740s, though she does spendsome time on Mme. de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves.) Again her basic argument seems familiar: Richardson dramatizes women’s marginal position, but then denies them agency in his typical ‘‘patriarchal closure.’’ Though she claims that ‘‘Richardson’s novel spawned as many revisionary texts as imitative ones by women,’’ she leaves the exploration of those texts to others. In ‘‘Renegotiating the Gothic’’ Betty Rizzo looks for constant Gothic forms and themes in eighteenth-century texts. (She makes a useful distinction between ‘‘generic’’ and ‘‘modal’’ Gothic, the recognizably ‘‘Gothic’’ text like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto as opposed to Gothic strains in other kinds of texts.) She stresses the symbolic ‘‘exposure of the usurping patriarch’’and the heroines’ rational activity in this exposure—and points out the subversive possibilities of these patterns. Much of the latter part of the essay could be described as sophisticated plot summary (of novels by Burney , Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith). But, though her essay is less ambitious and less studded with allusions to theory than Ms. Backscheider’s, Ms. Rizzo has sketched a promising approach to the appeal of the Gothic for women writers and readers. Rather than dismiss the Gothic as ‘‘the medium of the irrational and hysterical , women and homosexual males,’’ she shows the ways most writers of the Gothic insist on the union of sensibility and reason. Was this volume necessary? Does it really demonstrate the ‘‘maturity’’ of feminist literary criticism? Perhaps not, though the essays about Edgeworth and Austen are more suggestive and more original than the ones I have reviewed here. But it shows the persistence of old ways of thinking about the eighteenthcentury novel and indicates paths—some more promising than others—toward new and more satisfactory models. Elizabeth W. Harries Smith College APRIL LONDON. Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge : Cambridge, 1999. Pp. 262. $59.95. Ms. London’s wide-ranging, intricately argued book demonstrates the centrality of gender to eighteenth-century notions of property and selfhood. She does this by tracing the relationship between pastoral and georgic in the work of novelists from Richardson to Jane West, fascinatingly linking the works of such diverse authors as Sterne, McKenzie, Edward Bancroft, Clara Reeve, RobertBage and Thomas Holcroft. In the process, she accounts for the development ofthenovel in provocative new ways. The argument can become difficult to follow at times because it links culture with poetry, its political and gender affiliations and its incorporation into novels. However, Ms. London makes the political associations of georgic and pastoral clear by connecting them to bourgeois individualism and classical republicanism , and by demonstrating how novelists used these associations to investigate notions of property. The book’s great strengths are the close readings of novels. Novelists throughout the century, she argues, align themselves with either middle-class labor (georgic) or aristocratic paternalism (pastoral) in order to comment on the legitimacy of a changing social order and the new literary form of 91 the novel. Throwing genderintotheequation complicates our received notions of the relationship between property and selfhood because of women’s status as fully realized subjects in novels, and forms of property to be owned by men. The ways in which novelistsincorporated georgic and pastoral modes into their novels, therefore, reveal a great deal about their attitudes towards the present and the past, towards property and class, and towards women’s relationships to all of these. Not surprisingly, thepoliticalassociations of georgic and pastoral do not play out in the same ways in all works, nor do they remain constant throughout the century. In fact, by the 1790s, their political significations have reversed, with georgic identified with reactionary, anti-Jacobin sentiments and pastoral associated with the beliefs of utopian radicals like William Godwin. Ms. London avoidstheevidentiarytrap of many cultural studies by sticking close to the texts. When she reads culture through novels, she does so through narrative form. Authorial addresses to readers, narrative frames and other self-conscious techniques orient the novel towards culture. Richardson’s suppression of Clarissa’s ‘‘georgic’’ faith in...

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