Women’s Writing, 1660–1830: Feminisms and Futures ed. by Jennie Batchelor, Gillian Dow (review)

This is a brave and challenging book. The essays, written by almost two generations of some of the best scholar-critics in the field, fall into two categories. The framing essays look hard at what feminist scholarship has accomplished—and what it has not. In her postscript, Cora Kaplan remarks that “in the next few years” we will reach “the half-century of Anglophone feminist criticism” (215). As this collection shows, we have much to celebrate—including the miracle that is Chawton House, whose conferences nurtured these essays. In “the real world” of our classrooms, we can now take for granted that our students have studied women writers’ texts and can read easily through a feminist lens, and that is the result of thousands of students turned teachers that we have taught and who now people K–12 classrooms.

These essays call for feminist work that pushes literary history by being structured by “the logic of its recent resurgence” and “depends upon a broader questioning of the wider cultural and political inflections that have shaped what it is possible to see in or say about women’s writing of the past” (Introduction, 6–7). These authors note frustrations. For instance, in her essay, Jennie Batchelor observes that “curiously” the opinion that women’s use of anonymity was “a conciliatory or deferential strategy doggedly persists” (71). They include calls to arms that, in Katherine Binhammer’s words, dream of a striving among other things toward making “literary scholarship. . .as central to the women’s and gender studies curriculum as sociology” (“Feminist Literary History,” 65).

The second category of essays located at the center of the book do these things by demonstrating expansions of kinds of literature and literary history and of applied methodologies. Typical in its use of “cases” and one of the most original essays is Elaine McGirr’s “Authorial Performances: Actress, Author, Critic.” Using Nell Gwyn and Susanna Arne Cibber as models of work to be done, she argues that actresses made significant contributions to literary history by performing their parts and by inspiring types and lines of characters and plots that, among other things, “taught audiences. . .how to read. . .and feel about women” (88–89). Although her good book on Colley Cibber (Partial Histories) is performance studies, the perspective here is literary and so other scholars will need to look for styles of performance, degrees of improvisation or mimicry, and consider such things as prologues and epilogues designed for or even written by actresses. Here, as in other essays, American critics are not given their due. Specialist feminist critics will immediately miss the work of Diana Solomon and Felicity Nussbaum. Nevertheless, the degree of influence of actresses’ performances is not exaggerated, and this is an important essay.

In many of these essays, the expertise of the author leads to a searching consideration of a perennial issue. In “Anon, Pseud and ‘By a Lady,’” Batchelor takes up “Anon.” She usefully quotes James Raven’s arresting statistics that 80 percent of the new novels between 1750 and 1790 were so published, and then complements his work and Peter Garside’s. She rightly points out how many easy assumptions have already been questioned or even overturned. However, once Batchelor begins to enumerate the ways authors (or booksellers) embedded the identities of authors, she is unquestionably authoritative and offers solid guidance. For example, “By the Author of,” would have identified the author for a large number of those immersed in print culture, including general readers. With The Lady’s Magazine, a well-selected “case,” she persuasively argues the importance of the topic for filling out women’s literary history, astute ways to proceed, and the formidable complications with just one major periodical.

A strength of these essays is their longitudinal awareness even with comparatively neglected kinds of literature, such as “the children’s book trade.” M. O. Grenby, in “Pay...