Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820: Dangerous Occupations by Joseph Morrissey (review)

Women’s Domestic Activity provides a fresh look at the practices women engaged with in and around domestic space in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Joseph Morrissey’s book sits within an interdisciplinary network of texts (spanning material culture studies, history, art history, and literary studies) examining such “accomplishments” during this period. Activities from making music, drawing, and reading to craft practices such as needlework were socially expedient tasks enacted (sometimes performatively and most often within the home) in order to variously express femininity, gentility, and the self. Morrissey adopts a broad definition of the term “domestic,” but one that is entirely appropriate for the period under discussion. Here, the domestic is envisioned as a dually psychological and physical space, extending beyond the boundaries of the home to the social spaces in which women’s individual and collective identities could be performed.

Morrissey’s approach to these pursuits differs from other generalized accounts of such practices—notably Noël Riley’s The Accomplished Lady: A History of Genteel Pursuits, c. 1660–1860 (2017)—by examining their appearance within the genre of the novel. As texts characterized by a reliance on both the descriptive form and subjective narrative voice as literary devices, novels describing these pursuits offer important sources for understanding women’s domestic practices. Arguing that these activities were “intimately related to the creation and expression of self ... interventions into the web of human relations” (14), Morrissey considers these activities both as material and psychological acts, as forms of embodied labour, which created subjectivity and interpersonal connection as they unfolded “moment by moment” (9), an aspect that the temporality of the novel was particularly apt to capture.

Adopting a case-study format, the book examines novels by some of the most famous women writers of the period: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Northanger Abbey (1817), Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) and Ethelinde (1789), and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814). The chapters deploy these novels as a platform to think through how each author engages with a specific form of domestic activity, with chapters 2, 3, and 4 exploring the role of needlework, music, and reading, respectively, while chapter 5 considers domestic manifestations of sensibility and sympathy. After an introductory chapter outlining Morrissey’s focus on novels and defining both the domestic and the kinds of activities the book will discuss, chapter 2 focuses on the role played by needlework practices in Mansfield Park and The Old Manor House as a driver of characterization and social commentary, as relayed through the narrative details and description typical of the eighteenth-century novel. In these texts, needlework functions as “the basis for a moral and meaningful experience of the social world” (37), while otherwise reinforcing conservative views of femininity. Chapter 3 examines musical accomplishment in Burney’s The Wanderer, particularly as it relates to notions of skill, work, and class. By focusing on its protagonist Juliet’s attempts to earn a living through music, Morrissey is able to interrogate the gendered issues at play in amateur and professional musical production and performance, as well as its role in constructing women’s interpersonal relationships. In this chapter, the dichotomy of representation and reality that pervades the book is most clearly dealt with, specifically in relation to contemporary conduct literature versus individualized practices. Chapter 4 deals with Austen’s Northanger Abbey, positioning the text as a revealing study through which to unpick “contemporary debates about the reading of fiction” in terms of both its “political potential” and its “capacity to promote subjective well-being” (130). In order to do so, Morrissey engages with ideas from recent sociological experiments into reading practices, which have identified specific types of readers, allowing him to rethink how Austen presents reading as a fantasy that related to women’s psychological experiences and interior lives. The final chapter builds on...