Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England by Cecile M. Jagodzinski (review)

82 case studies, Ms. Sorensen rightly disturbs ‘‘common-sense’’ models of historical cause and effect, as indigenous identities, for example, are shown to be the retrospective creations of standardizing impulses as much as thevictims.All of the figures she studies, whether based in London, the Lowlands, or the Highlands , prove to be ambivalent about their relations to an English center and a common language, and most of the texts examined are found to be radically selfalienated . Some of these rereadings are very convincing: the opening analysis of Alexander MacDonald’s 1741 Gaelic/ English Vocable, produced for the assimilationist SSPCKwhileenablinghislater ‘‘agit-prop Jacobite poems in Gaelic,’’ effectively illustrates the inadequacy of a simple historical model of co-optation giving way to resistance. Yet doesn’t the discovery of mimicry, doubling, and instability everywhere point to the need for a more precise taxonomy of the negotiations between binary oppositions? In other words, how do we distinguish between the effects of a Johnson regionalizing class distinctions, a Smollett rewriting regional differences as class or gender distinctions, or a Smith and Blair relocating the heroism and virtue of the nation in a less differentiated past? The study significantly ends in an epilogue on Jane Austen’s fictions. Ms. Sorenson asserts that Austen, the ‘‘center’’ of English domestic and linguistic propriety , is by virtue of her position as a middle-class woman writer as alienated from a standard language as are ‘‘the Jacobite Gaelic poet wandering the mountain nooks of the Hebrides, the broadScots -speaking expatriate fearfully silent in hostile London streets, and the Highland poet ventriloquizing a mythical bard. . . .’’ The comparison between this self-conscious and ironic writer and the variously marginal authors of the preceding study is provocative, but works against the very particularity which Ms. Sorenson has insisted upon throughout. If the language of any individual writer in any regional or gendered or class-defined space displays the same qualities of self-division, the real questions become those of distinguishing between forms of self-division and situated agency . Nevertheless, this admirably ambitious study makes an important contribution to the mapping of languagetheory. Betty A. Schellenberg Simon Fraser University CECILE M. JAGODZINSKI. Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth -Century England. Charlottesville: Virginia, 1999. Pp. x ⫹ 218. $45. Privacy and Print seeks to locate the novel’s origins in Protestant experiences of scriptural reading, writing, and publication . It also tries to determine how ReformationabsorptionwithGod’sWord became Restoration trade in secular fiction . The book’s virtue is that it responds to big timeless questions with a wealth of new material—new texts (by women), new contexts (including religion, politics , culture, gender), and new ways of defining period (as ‘‘early modern’’). The book’s difficulties stem from its strengths: its broad scope includes more than it can handle; conversely, it does not provide all necessary material; and it can get lost in its own fine arguments. The book divides into thirds—two chapters on God’s Word, one on royal words, two on Restoration self and story. Ms. Jagodzinski first examines the textual practices of English Protestantism, distinguishing among 1590s Catholics forced by Protestant authoritiestoreplace 83 communal worship with individual prayerbook -reading, radical Protestants who rejected formal prayer for more activeengagement with Scripture, and 1650s Anglicans compelled (like 1590s Catholics) to substitute public ritual with private reading. The 1590s and 1650s gave Protestant textual experience an intimate emphasis : ‘‘[T]he repression of Catholics [and later Anglicans] . . . became a spark that fired a particularly English notion of privacy.’’ She then examines four narratives of conversion-by-reading: Henry Jessey’s 1647 report on Sarah Wight, Bunyan’s 1666 Grace Abounding, Gilbert Burnet’s 1680 story of Eve Cohan’s conversion from Judaism, the 1700 tale of Ann Ketelbey’s Catholic seduction. The author’s claim of historical progression from religion to fiction falters because she confuses conversion-narratives from two genres (namely, spiritual autobiography and romance). Nevertheless, she makes a key point: all forms of Protestant reading ‘‘justify’’ or authorize the reader in the Word. (More attentionneeds to be paid to Bunyan and Milton, who gave remarkably public voicetointensely private scriptural encounters.) Ms. Jagodzinski next explores an epochal instance of privacy gone (wildly) public—Charles...