Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1791 by Alison Conway (review)

61 ment of women in editing women(aswell as men) can be productive of highly important new insights.’’ Karina Williamson University of Edinburgh ALISON CONWAY. Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1791. Toronto: Toronto, 2001. Pp. 293. $65. ‘‘A History-painter paints man in general; a Portrait-painter, a particular man, and consequently a defective model ,’’ Reynolds pronounced in 1771. The vexed question of relations between public and private was very much alive in eighteenth-century portraiture, as Ms. Conway shows. Dismissed critically as an inferior art form lacking the gravity and importance of history painting, portraiture was nevertheless increasingly popular and in demand. Reynolds incorporated the values of history paintinginto portraiture, producing portraitsofwomen as historical, allegorical, and mythological characters. Such images could have a wider appeal than the individual portrait , especially when reproduced as engravings for public sale. But for most eighteenth-century artists and critics,Ms. Conway suggests, the portrait was associated with ‘‘private interests,’’ and condemned for promoting ‘‘solipsistic states of vanity and narcissism’’ or celebrated for ‘‘establishing affective relations between individuals.’’ In this, she believes, portraiture had a reception very similarto the eighteenth-century novel, agenrealso linked with women and ‘‘private interests .’’ Ms. Conway writes well about female spectatorship in Manley’s New Atalantis; about the role of miniature portraits in Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless and Fielding ’s Amelia; about parallels between Angelica Kauffmann’s self-portraits and novels by Wollstonecraft and Inchbald; and about Richardson’s references to Clarissa’sportrait‘‘intheVandykestyle,’’ examining that style in eighteenthcentury portraiture as simultaneously contemporary and historical, denoting both fashion and continuity. The Sterne chapter, which argues for more benign gender relations in Tristram Shandy than the novel supports, is less persuasive, and portraiture becomes more metaphorical than actual. Given her anti-Foucauldian stance and her wish to defend pleasure, thebody,and the visual against those who would see novels as merely ideologicalinstruments, Ms. Conway has surprisingly little to say about eroticism. In her discussion of women readers’ portraits as primarily elevating their subjects, for example, she does not engage with that other tradition of representing the female reader as erotic object (a practice found in fiction— including, indeed, Manley’s and Haywood ’s—as well as in visual art). The possibility of a female-female eroticism which is not equated with narcissismalso seems curiously absent in her discussions of female spectatorship in Manley and of Angelica Kauffmann’s ‘‘Self-Portrait: Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting.’’ A more significant problem is one that Ms. Conway herself indicates: the function of her central term, ‘‘private interests ,’’ as a link between ‘‘the novel’’ and ‘‘the portrait.’’Quoting Wendy Steineron the dangers of the ‘‘three-term’’comparative model, Ms. Conway recognizes the danger that ‘‘private interests’’ could mean one thing in the world of the novel and another in the world of the portrait. For her, ‘‘the particular dialectic governing both the portrait’s and the novel’s in- 62 terest in women’s relation to private interests would seem to guarantee, at least partially, the stability of the term as a terrain shared by the two genres.’’ The phrase ‘‘private interests,’’ however, which she quotes from Rousseau and invokes constantly, is never traced in eighteenth -century English usage, whether stable or shifting, and this lack of definition is a distraction. At times the phrase seems less intended to bridge the worlds of the novel and the portrait than to produce rhetorically the sense of a higher level ofabstractionabout‘‘thenovel’’and ‘‘the portrait’’ than the case studies alone would justify. Without wishing to side with Blake’s attack on Reynolds (‘‘To Generalize is to be an Idiot’’), I find this book’s virtue not in its grand claims, but in its revealing particulars. Caroline Gonda St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge ANN MESSENGER.PastoralTraditionand the Female Talent: Studies in Augustan Poetry. New York: AMS, 2001. Pp. 248. $74.50. One of three books writtenorco-edited by Ms. Messenger in the last years before her untimely death in 1996, this is an eloquent testimony to her unquenchable enthusiasm and energy for researching the lives and writings of women poets of the Restoration and eighteenth century...