Nature's Questions, Answered

Over seventy years ago, Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth-Century Poets (1946) founded a tradition of literary criticism that was informed by the history of science and studies of the early Royal Society. Melissa Bailes's excellent Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750–1830 offers an important new contribution to this tradition by foregrounding scientific-literary productions surrounding the "second Scientific Revolution" (1), a period that she extends back to the mid-eighteenth century and tracks forward to the late Regency era of the 1830s. Bailes's monograph explores women writers' contributions to the professionalization of the genre of natural history. She demonstrates how, during this period, a cadre of figures as politically and aesthetically diverse as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Shelley, and Felicia Hemans actively identified and capitalized on the joint potential of imaginative writing and the field of natural history in order to posit their claims as original, authentic writers of science and literature.

As both poetry and science were in a state of crisis (4), and as Britain faced revolution and war in its colonies and on the Continent, Bailes shows us how each writer negotiated the challenging concepts of Romantic genius and sociability: she examines how the binaries of collaboration vs. autonomy, plagiarism vs. originality, evolution vs. degeneration, and radicalism vs. conservatism inform and inflect these authors' participation in both the scientific and literary communities. Bailes argues that by negotiating these tensions and combining the study of natural history with poetry and poetics, these authors developed a distinctive tradition that elevated women's participation in both fields: "In the latter half of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth, women's literary naturalism enabled them to challenge the assertions of male naturalists and suggest women's supremacy in both poetry and science, as well as explore possibilities for literary originality" (203). Through this exploration, Bailes recovers an alternative literary and scientific canon of early and high Romanticism.

Divided into three sections, Questioning Nature begins with two chapters that consider the status of natural history and literary naturalism, showing how, in the mid-eighteenth century, women could fruitfully participate in wider discourses of politics and nationalism. The first chapter argues that Anna Laetitia Barbauld's roles as a literary naturalist and educator were framed by a Horatian understanding of delighting and instructing her audiences: scientific prose was meant to define and teach, whereas descriptive poetry was meant to provide pleasure. Bailes provides detailed close readings of Barbauld's poetic output (along with her brother John Aikin's taxonomic writing) to show how the author-poet "mimics the creation of scientific laws" by "mov[ing] from the particular to the abstract and universal" (43), balancing information known to general audiences with innovations in scientific description and observation. Bailes observes that Barbauld's writing anticipates Wordsworthian critiques of scientific abstraction and its potentially alienating effects on audiences; she suggests that Barbauld's "descriptive nature poetry subtly recalibrated women's relations to nature and pleasure, and influenced subsequent female writers who looked on her precedent as one to be followed, repudiated, and modified for the next four decades" (44). In this way, Bailes suggests, Barbauld's work serves as a significant middle ground between male Romantics like Lamb and Wordsworth, who rejected the so-called "exclusionary practices" of science, and poets like Maria Riddell and Charlotte Smith, who found the increasing professionalization and regularization of scientific nomenclature as vital for their own poetic and aesthetic tradition.

Chapter 2 is of particular interest for literary historians of science and empire, as well as for critics interested in the formal dimensions of poetry in the later decades of the century. Bailes compellingly defines what she understands to be Maria Riddell's "West India Georgic" as a mode of poetry that pushes against British cultural concerns of colonial degeneration via miscegenation and other forms of hybridity. Focusing...