Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility by Mary Eagleton (review)

In Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility, Mary Eagleton explores the figure of “the scholarship girl, the clever girl, the professional woman or, in some guises, the ‘superwoman’ who ‘has it all’” in a wide range of texts published between the 1960s and the present (p. 2). This figure is referred to “in her millennium and post-millenium incarnations [as] the ‘future girl’ or the ‘top girl’” (p. 2). She has frequently been the protagonist of novels, memoirs, and plays by British women, and the authors Eagleton examines include Hilary Mantel, Margaret Drabble, A. S. Byatt, Janice Galloway, Caryl Churchill, Zadie Smith, and Linda Grant. Eagleton uses their novels primarily as social documents, in order to explore changing attitudes towards women’s education and careers in Britain since World War II.

Eagleton tells a story about class mobility, but it is a story that now belongs largely to the past. In the postwar decades, scholarships and grants enabled British children from less privileged backgrounds to access higher education and improve their prospects. But from the 1980s onwards, state support began to be withdrawn, as a “neoliberal ethic of self-making” took hold (p. 3). As a result, Eagleton points out, “the dominance of people from privileged backgrounds has become more pronounced over the last thirty years rather than less” (p. 3), and it is harder for a child born in poverty to achieve a higher socioeconomic status in the twenty-first century than at any other point since the 1950s (p. 167). On the other hand, many of the barriers to women’s achievement have been removed. In 1961, nine girls out of ten left school before the age of eighteen. Today, by contrast, women students outnumber men in British universities, although black and ethnic minority groups are still seriously underrepresented in the student body (p. 3). While the word “intersectionality” does not appear until a late point, Eagleton’s book is, nevertheless, all about intersections among gender, class, and (to a lesser extent) race.

A fascinating aspect of Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s Upward Mobility is its sustained discussion of the discourse of mobility—the ideologically charged vocabulary of chance and choice, of merit and opportunity. As Eagleton observes, “the literary writer enjoys turning a critical eye on this language” (p. 4). Through her close readings, Eagleton examines the complexity of terms such as “meritocracy.” Apparently describing a society in which anyone with talent and dedication can succeed, “meritocracy” actually curtails equality; it endorses a hierarchical system and deems those who do not rise in the hierarchy to be undeserving. The clever girls who feature in Eagleton’s chosen texts have to buy into the discourse of merit in order to succeed, and since upward mobility often involves leaving friends and family behind, this generates conflict and guilt. Eagleton includes a telling quotation from Patricia Beer’s 1983 poem, “The Lost Woman,” in which a mother says to a daughter: “I showed you the way to rise above me / And you took it” (p. 39).

Eagleton’s impassioned introduction, together with the final coda, are the most powerful parts of her book. They offer an eloquent account of the damaging effects of neoliberal individualism. This argument is illustrated, in the six main chapters, with examples from the literature. Some of the chapters are more compelling than others. The first three, focusing mainly on Mantel, Byatt, and Drabble, rely heavily on biographical and character-based interpretation and do not really offer the kind of oppositional readings that the introduction promises. The remaining three chapters, exploring the work of a later generation of women writers, are more thoroughly analytical and will be especially stimulating for scholars interested in the future of feminism in a neoliberal world. The book as a whole is based on an impressive body of research (cited, however, in...