Forging Connections: Women’s Poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. by Anne K. Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum, and Jonathan F. S. Post (review)

178 time. More puzzling is Ms. Peakman’s offhanded claim in a footnote: in A Rake’s Progress, Tom Rakewell’s cast mistress, the long-suffering Sarah Young, becomes a ‘‘brazen prostitute.’’ Such an unusual interpretation merits elaboration. Likewise, Hogarth’s ‘‘Before ’’ from the interior Before and After is included, but with no apparent connection to the text. Other graphics are put to better use; the inclusion of portraits of the women themselves is a compelling way to underscore that these texts are frequently the stories of real women, and the discussion of an illustration from an 1874 edition of a French translation of Mandeville’s A Modest Defense of the Public Stews draws connections between image and subject matter. With only one exception in these four volumes, the text is clean and easy to read. One account has been transcribed because the original was barely legible, and one more perhaps should have been; the text of The Life of the Late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn is bent on the page as though it were a faulty Xerox rather than a quality facsimile, and small portions of line endings are cut off. Given the high quality of other reproductions in the books, one can only assume there was no other remedy. Nevertheless , this is a rich and rewarding collection of material, useful on gender and genre. Heather King University of Redlands Forging Connections: Women’s Poetry from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Anne K. Mellor, Felicity Nussbaum, and Jonathan F. S. Post. San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2002. Pp. 161. $15 (paper). The collected essays were read at a conference at the Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. While male authors could draw long, linear connections between their poetry and that of their forebears —the editors mention how Dryden could claim Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton as his literary forebears—women authors could do no such thing; indeed, the editors discovered that there was no precise authorial lineage that presented itself regarding women poets because the ranks of their community were thin and diffuse. Therefore, creating a literary community receptive to their works was ‘‘errant’’ and surreptitious. Donna Landry’s ‘‘Green Languages?: Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807’’ explores questions of whether women poets perceived nature differently from male poets. The answer: a self-evident ‘‘yes.’’ Margaret Cavendish used nature poetry to critique masculine arenas such as sports and Charlotte Smith connected the countryside with the study of botany, which ‘‘was one of the few kinds of scientific inquiry permitted women in the eighteenth century .’’ For example, women poets could exhibit their ‘‘close connection, though a vexed one’’ to sport or hunting ‘‘in brilliant detail, invoking all five senses,’’ legitimizing their literary work and making its themes and philosophical claims more authentic to a reader. Clearly , Smith was lucky that her botanic work was not picked on by Richard Polwhele in ‘‘Unsexed Females.’’ In the fascinating ‘‘Love in All Its Oddness: The Affections in Women’s Private Poetry of the Eighteenth Century ,’’ Margaret A. Doody discusses the ways that women connected emotionally with poetic subjects and how the ‘‘circles of objects for proper affections ’’—based on Adam Smith’s Theory 179 of Moral Sentiments—became increasingly fixed. Smith’s system began with the head of the nuclear family and then expanded in concentric circles of filial attachment, but women such as Anne Finch found worthy topics for poetry outside the conventional realms of family, courtship, and marriage. Thus, women poets such as Katherine Phillips and Finch challenged Smith’s objects of legitimate loyalty and love, asserting seriously that they could feel affection and sympathy for other women and even animals or birds; they are all captives , without the ‘‘liberties’’ of the male world. To Ms. Doody, men often look at animals as objects of desire or ownership ; women, on the contrary, look at them as companions or even as symbols of their relationship to others in society. Women could establish historical links to each other by such themes in their poetry, while rejecting similar topics in poetry by men as inappropriate or irrelevant . Questioning another male paradigm, contemporary politics, Charlotte Smith’s poetry often engaged...