Women Writing Fancy: Authorship and Autonomy from 1611 to 1812 by Maura Smyth (review)

"Is love a fancy, or a feeling?" Hartley Coleridge asked, answering, "No. It is immortal as immaculate Truth." As described at the outset of Maura Smyth's Women Writing Fancy, Hartley's father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had played a crucial role in reducing "fancy" to the opposite of the immortal, immaculate, and truthful, subservient to the totalizing creative power of the Romantic "Imagination"—a conceptualization later adopted by twentieth-century critics from M. H. Abrams onward (3–4).

This book seeks to recover the apparently ephemeral, trivial, and flighty aspects of Fancy as an alternative form of creative agency, and one that—through being defined and denigrated in gendered terms—became particularly open to appropriation by women. Written with considerable style and critical verve, Women Writing Fancy describes its subject as amoral, autonomous, restless, and playful, always hovering on the margins of texts—what Smyth calls its "bareliness or mereliness" (37)—and needing to be teased out. As detailed in the introduction, Fancy first emerges at the turn of the seventeenth century as a mental faculty, before being recast as something closer to a tool or epistemology (22). Its very ludic and provisional nature made it a useful mode of critique that, despite its apparent weakness, could challenge established structures and master narratives by imagining alternative possibilities (33).

The book is divided into three sections, the first of which examines how Fancy was conceptualized by male writers over the course of the seventeenth century, when it first began to be consistently differentiated from the Imagination. This yields a number of fresh readings and connections drawn between canonical texts. Chapter 2 brings together the islands of William Shakespeare's Tempest and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis as spaces whose permeable borders make them particularly open to flights of Fancy. In The Tempest, Smyth identifies an "Ariel function" as representative of her vision of Fancy: a marginal but crucial structuring element whose main impact is through ornamentation and annoyance, not organized resistance to power, as represented by Prospero (61). Bacon's scientific utopia, on the other hand, is characterized by a resistance to the ludic and subjective in favor of pursuing a uniform objective truth: how things are rather than how they might be. Yet in Smyth's account, Fancy still manages to sneak in around the edges: through the fictional form of the New Atlantis itself, as well as through glimpses of the decorative-yet-invisible female inhabitants of Bensalem, who are not granted access to its rational ideal.

Chapter 3 examines the relationship between Fancy and sovereignty in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and John Milton's Paradise Lost, by which point it has become decidedly feminized. The real-world political and religious implications of sovereignty are only hinted at: it may be significant that the four main female writers examined in this book all had Tory sympathies, yet Anna Barbauld (discussed in the final section) was anything but. At one point, Fancy seems to be "structurally aligned with" religious nonconformity (97). It would, however, have been difficult to construct a coherent political trajectory for something as ephemeral as Fancy across this long and rapidly-changing period. The concern here is with a more "aesthetic" understanding of sovereignty (93)—as Smyth puts it, "not the invention of sovereignty but the sovereignty of inventiveness" (143)—which allows it to become a model for how female writers assume control over a fictional world.

This appropriation of Fancy by women is the subject of the three central chapters, most clearly shown in the case of Margaret Cavendish, a sometimes idiosyncratic figure in literary history who here becomes the lynchpin of the argument. Cavendish's Fancy, like Eve's gaze at her own reflection in Paradise Lost, is self-pleasing and inward-turning, yet over the course of her career she learns to open up Fancy's possibilities to other women. Her Blazing World is tellingly linked...