Minerva's Gothics: The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780–1820 by Elizabeth A. Neiman (review)

Elizabeth Neiman's Minerva's Gothics is a fantastic book in part because it looks at its subject, the significance of the literary production of the Minerva Press in London ca. 1780–1820, from so many different angles. The book begins with a section that presents and analyzes the history of Minerva Press, continues with a section offering insightful interpretations of individual Minerva Press novels, then juxtaposes the ideology of those novels with the poetics of canonical writers, and finally relates its arguments to the larger context of Romanticism. The book takes a new and important approach by selecting as its corpus the novels of one publisher, rather than examining one author, topic, or period. (The only similar previous monograph was Dorothy Blakey's more bibliographical The Minerva Press from 1939.) Neiman's conclusion—that the Romantics' appeal to individual genius and independent feeling has always been based on, and balanced with, a network of popular conventions and shared social texts—is utterly compelling and constitutes an important contribution to the field.

As Neiman delicately points out, most scholars are not usually familiar with the novels published by the Minerva Press, which became famous in the 1780s and 1790s under the direction of William Lane (176). Instead, scholars often rely on the stereotypes that the "Minerva novels" are repetitive, formulaic, and artistically inferior, and that they cater to a female taste. Minerva's Gothics doesn't exactly debunk those stereotypes, but rather shows that they are only part of the picture. To begin that process, Neiman analyzes data about the Minerva authors in a distant reading. She shows that there were six phases in the history of the Minerva Press: a period in which Lane was but a minor player in the literary marketplace (1780–84), followed by phases that saw the initial establishment of the press (1785–89) and its rise to prominence, and then dominance, of the literary marketplace (1790–94 and 1795–1802). The final two phases in the Minerva Press's history saw the beginning and the extension of its decline (1803–11 and 1812–20). Some of Neiman's findings confirm stereotypes (it did publish more female authors than did other presses and these authors were indeed quite prolific), while other discoveries yield new characterizations of the press (most significantly, many Minerva authors went on to write for other publishers, which ensured the influence of the press beyond the period of its apparent decline). Throughout its fifty-year history, Minerva novels were reviewed like other novels and participated in contemporary debates about issues including authorship, social hierarchy, and poetic genius. This first section of Minerva's Gothics then shifts gears from presentation and analysis of Minerva Press's history to close reading of scenes in Minerva novels in which authors interact with publishers. The only drawback of this informative and engaging chapter is that the tables are hard to read: the different shades of grey are sometimes difficult to distinguish.

In the remaining three sections of Minerva's Gothics, Neiman examines the significance of the Minerva Press in relation to women's sentimental writing, the British reaction to the French Revolution, and poetic sensibility. To some extent, these sections are chronological, successively considering novels from Minerva's early period, its zenith, and its decline. The structure of these three sections is the same; each tracks an explicit or implicit conversation between one or two canonical Romantic authors and Minerva novels. Thus, it breaks with the tradition of centering arguments in the canon and treating the Minerva novels as marginal; instead, the argument treats canonical authors and Minerva novels as equals. The plot summaries of Minerva novels included in these sections are not only necessary, since most scholars are unlikely to have read these primary texts, but carefully calibrated, so that only details relevant to the argument are...