Reading Daughters’ Fictions 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth by Caroline Gonda (review)

77 of Lord Cornbury, Colonial Governor of New York, dressed in full female Court regalia, is a sure misfire. This is a serious book on a serious subject,andthatsubject is not transvestism. Finally, Ms. Barash complains of the absence of reliable scholarly editions of many of these writers . Well, this was not entirely true in 1995 and it is wholly untrue now. Maureen E. Mulvihill Princeton Research Forum CAROLINE GONDA. Reading Daughters’ Fictions 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth. Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996. Pp. xvii ⫹ 287. £49; $60. Eighteenth-century life and literature, Ms. Gonda argues, are full of instances of the daughter’s struggle with the father. From the parricide Mary Blandy, hanged for poisoning her father, to thesaintly,fictional Clarissa, hoping beyond hope for reconciliation with Mr. Harlowe, daughters are defined through their (always problematic) filial relationships. The different tragic ends of Clarissa and Mary Blandy both stem from the failure of the father-daughter relationship to carry out the role assigned to it, to serve for the young woman as an apprenticeship for the marriage that should succeed it. Paternal authority changes its emphasis but not its nature during the eighteenth century, and unambiguous fatherly tyranny —forced marriage, open representations of paternal sexual assault— gradually gives way, under the influence of sentimentalism, to a softer paternal affection , represented in novels as an insistently pure and tender care. This, however , does not free the daughter: on the contrary, it makes for a strong emotional tie to the father that can lead to ever more effective control of her mind and feelings as well as her actions. The ‘‘daughters ’ fictions’’—stories of daughterly experience —so central to the eighteenthcentury novel, are not the subversive examples feared at the time by conservative critics of the new genre, but participators in the construction and control of female heterosexuality, and promulgators of lessons that tend to ‘‘bolster rather than undermine familial and social order.’’ So far, so Foucauldian. But Ms. Gonda is much more alive to the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the novels than this summary suggests, and her wide-ranging discussion refuses in the end to be confined within the bounds she delineates at the outset. Most interesting is her consideration of the fiction written by the daughter as author. While some Gothic novelists write in defence of a paternal authority they feel to be threatened in the post-Revolutionary world, Mary Shelley ’s Mathilda offers a challenge or accusation to her distant father. Even such famously father-doting daughters as Burney and Edgeworth are revealed as critics of paternal smothering. Her chapter on Edgeworth defends her from Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s famous reading of her as a dependent and compromised ‘‘father’s daughter,’’ unable to find an authority apart from his. Through her reading of Helen in the light of Edgeworth’s relationship with her dying father, Ms. Gonda shows thedaughter reaching an independent position,‘‘being a better writer than her father . . . knowing it, and . . . refusing at the last to please him by pretending she didn’t.’’Ms. Gonda does not analyze thesourceofthisselfconfidence , but hints at the end that the ‘‘father’s house’’ may not be the enemy of female authority it has been taken to be. Jane Spencer University of Exeter ...