Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History by Ben P. Robertson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 615 One of the features of Davies’s work was its careful tracing of the dis­ turbing presence of Wales within canonical Romanticism. Although this approach might seem to perpetuate a certain kind of anglocentricism, in fact it reveals that much of what is regarded—and often figured itself—as “English” Literature was deeply dependent on its archipelagic context, if not always willing to acknowledge the fact. Not that this presence is often accounted for in mainstream Romanticism courses. Recent surveys ofsuch courses in English Departments in Britain have suggested that the intercultural aspects of archipelagic literature are rarely registered. Burns has little presence in Romanticism courses, for instance, unless they have a specifically Scottish focus, although it is hard to conceive ofWordsworth’s career taking the shape it took without Burns. Although Wordsworth tended to write sympathetically about Burns, he also tended to construct him as an erring junior partner, contrary to their chronologies. Of course, the construction of such a relationship was typical ofUnionist ideology af­ ter 1800; where it was not simply hostile or explicitly condescending, it has tended to make cultural space for the Scots, Welsh, and Irish within a hier­ archy whose apex is always implicitly English. Those hierarchies can make it difficult to write about the interpenetration of the cultures of the British archipelago without seeming to perpetuate some kind ofascendancy of this kind. Yet as the volumes under review here show, to question the auton­ omy ofnational traditions need not be to do the work ofa center that con­ structed itself as superior to such “local” claims. “Locality,” indeed, think­ ing about the ways these different cultural forms, national, global, or otherwise, have been given articulation in particular times and places, may be one way of escaping metropolitan assumptions of a disinterested superiority. Jon Mee University of York, UK Ben P. Robertson. Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation: A Publishing and Reception History. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Pp. xv+265. $99. In recent decades, Elizabeth Inchbald has emerged as one of the Romantic period’s most diverse and influential female figures, and the publication of Ben P. Robertson’s monograph, Elizabeth Inchbald’s Reputation, part of Pickering & Chatto’s “History of the Book” series, stands to document and to celebrate the longer history of her celebrity status. Robertson focuses his study, subtitled “A Publication and Reception History,” on how Inchbald’s wide-ranging career, which included work as actress, playSiR , 52 (Winter 2013) 616 BOOK REVIEWS wright, novelist, and theater critic, was both shaped and perceived by con­ temporary audiences and subsequent reviewers. Indeed, as critics have long recognized, Inchbald was a highly successful practitioner of Romantic era “self-fashioning,” retaining a consistent and judicious awareness of the ef­ fects of public perception on the reputation of her art. As an aspiring ac­ tress, the young, self-educated, and Catholic Elizabeth Simpson was vul­ nerable on multiple fronts; her early marriage to the actor Joseph Inchbald provided much needed protection and, after his sudden death, the respect­ able title of widow. By understanding and manipulating the imbrication of personal with artistic reputation, the celebrated “Mrs. Inchbald” sustained a long and prosperous career on both stage and page. That career, combined with Inchbald’s careful documentation of its oversight, makes her an ideal subject for the task Robertson outlines in his introduction: “to assess Inchbald’s reputation, both during her lifetime and afterward,” through examination of primary and secondary sources that in­ clude her “diaries and biographies, her drama, her novels, the criticism she wrote for The British Theatre, and newspaper and magazine accounts of her life and work over the past two centuries and more” (7). Robertson seems especially well-suited for this project, having edited Inchbald’s Diaries for Pickering & Chatto (3 volumes, 2007) and authored a comparative analysis of Inchbald’s writing and reception, Inchbald, Hawthorne, and the Romantic Moral Romance (Pickering & Chatto, 2010). He organizes this new recep­ tion study around four main “phase[s] of Inchbald’s career,” which in­ cluded “acting, playwriting, novel writing, and criticism production,” in order to investigate both “public responses to her work” and “her own re­ sponses to public criticism” (7). In using...