Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 by Orianne Smith (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 619 ness of that recovery will open new possibilities for scholars to extend the crucial work of reevaluating Inchbald’s place in the history of theater, celebrity, and literature. Shawn Lisa Maurer College of the Holy Cross Orianne Smith. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebel­ lious Daughters, 1786—1826. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. 293. $95. Situated between studies of millenarianism’s class consciousness and the feminist reappraisal of women’s writing in the Romantic period, Orianne Smith’s Romantic Women Writers, Revolution, and Prophecy: Rebellious Daugh­ ters, 1786—1826 argues that not only was visionary, apocalyptic writing un­ dertaken by women as well as men, but this writing is a complex form of social protest. Part secular, part sacred, sometimes catastrophic in orienta­ tion, sometimes progressive, such writing was a means by which women attempted to achieve world-historical relevance at a time when patriarchal institutions afforded them few if any “legitimate” opportunities for expres­ sion. Perhaps ironically, it is the flexibility rather than univocity ofwhat Ian Balfour has called the “prophetic mode” that proves, in Smith’s analysis, especially important to its generic coherence. Thanks to their hermeneutic resourcefulness—or, according to critics, a “typological excess” productive of “deranged and manic exegesis” (14)—prophets, speaking in the same style as each other, might read the same historical event in radically differ­ ent ways. Take the French Revolution. “For Dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, Helen Maria Williams, and [Anna] Barbauld, and Dissenting sympathizers like Wollstonecraft, progressive millennialism [spurred by the Revolution] brought with it a renewed faith in the eventual abolition of slavery, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the eradication of gender inequality” (17). At the same time, “Anglicans such as Joseph Galloway and Hannah More believed that the events across the channel signaled something like the beginning ofArmageddon” (19). What Smith’s work reveals, then, is that thanks to the prophetic mode women were ca­ pable ofparticipating in debates about nationalism, religion, and world his­ tory in ways that cannot be homogenized. Smith argues, instead, that what these writers share is a turn to “an illocutionary speech act,” a kind of say­ ing that accomplishes—or tries to accomplish—what it announces through its mode of performance (23). Thus, promising and cursing do not merely describe situations but manifest a political and social intent in the very fact SiR, 52 (Winter 2013) 620 BOOK REVIEWS oftheir utterance. Over the course of six compact chapters and a briefEpi­ logue, Smith explores the specific practices of “five very different Roman­ tic women writers engaged in political prophecy” (33), situating their performative prophetic writing within larger cultural and artistic trends in the later eighteenth century including acts of improvisation, the discourse of sympathy, the Gothic genre, and moral philosophy. In her first chapter, “Verbal magic: an etymology of female enthusiasm,” Smith looks back to the sectarian female prophets of the English Civil War to contextualize prophetic writing and practice by women in Ro­ manticism. In spite of enthusiasm’s bad reputation—cemented during the Restoration—and its generally diminished cultural currency in the more sober eighteenth century, Smith argues that Romantic women prophets draw on these precursors and participate in a tradition ofsuch writing. The “use of the word ‘tradition’ here and elsewhere is deliberate” (6), Smith in­ sists early on, situating the phenomenon of female prophecy within the controversy between “tradition” and “right” as two different grounds of authority. Female prophecy, for Smith, draws its power from both sides. Because women from Hester Lynch Piozzi to Helen Maria Williams to Mary Shelley situated themselves with the prophetic tradition, Smith ar­ gues, their claims to political legitimacy carried more weight with Burke­ ans and other conservative thinkers. At the same time, Smith stresses that the performative nature of prophetic writing bases its authority in its au­ tonomy: like a rights claim, female prophecy is expressed by fiat and makes a transcendental gesture beyond any limiting (and often discouraging, patri­ archal) tradition. The trouble with the latter form of justification is, of course, that it threatens to elude regulation. Indeed, extending Judith Butler’s discussion of gender performance and the opportunities there afforded for...