A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain, 1660 - 1789
The latest offering from Susan Staves, Professor Emeritus of English at Brandeis University, is profoundly important, not surprising given the caliber of her previous contribution to the field of early women—literary and otherwise. The decades of expertise evident here in the seemingly effortless syntheses of historical movements, and incisive arguments about a wide spectrum of authors are presented in wonderful prose, like backbone under fine linen.
The book is carefully organized, with much attention paid to chronology and genre, neither of which Staves side-steps. The chapters are arranged chronologically, with the era she covers divided into seven shorter periods, yet within each are discussions separated by genre—poetry, polemic, translations, drama, histories, and novels. The chapters are “Public women: The Restoration to the death of Aphra Behn, 1660-1689”; “Partisans of virtue and religion, 1689-1702”; “Politics, gallantry, and ladies in the reign of Queen Anne, 1702-1714”; “Battle joined, 1715-1737”; “Women as members of the literary family, 1737-1756”; “Bluestockings and sentimental writers, 1756-1776” and finally “Romance and comedy, 1777-1789”. Each chapter is headed with a useful chronological list of the primary texts and authors that Staves addresses there, followed by a succinct introduction to that period. A brief review is then devoted to each text, with summary and commentary balanced by consideration of the author’s career. Helpful notes, one or two pages in length, about a key concept or genre often appear between the discussions of texts, for example on Provincial Novelties, Travel Literature, Rome and France, Letters.
Her vision, then, takes in political, literary, and religious climates and women’s responses to each. Most importantly, Staves is concerned with how we read the texts now, and she embraces serious criticism where she finds it warranted. This mandate she sets up in her Introduction: “It cannot be a sin against feminism to say that some women wrote well and others wrote badly, that some were intelligent, reflective, and original, others dull, unreflective, and formulaic” (4). In this she answers some of the troubled responses about literary value that have been proposed to Germaine’s Greer’s 1996 Slip-shod Sibyls, and goes a very long way toward writing the history that Margaret Ezell called for in Writing Literary Women’s History (1993).
Staves’ self-confidence is justified, and persuasive is her grasp of political and philosophical movements that in large part explain texts which are too often still read in terms of personal expression alone. Particularly striking is the line of argument in the second chapter, “Partisans of virtue and religion, 1689-1702” where works in opposition to libertinism are given their full due, particularly the writings of Mary Astell. The conclusion to this chapter is worth quoting at length:
While to modern eyes this alliance women forged with the late seventeenth-century forces of religion and virtue may at first appear dreary or repressive or catastrophically sexless, Astell and many of her contemporaries judged it both intrinsically right and in the best interests of contemporary women. Given the real contempt for women in the older patriarchal ideology and the crucial role of theology in that ideology, and given the real dangers to seventeenth-century women posed by libertine philosophy and rakish practics, I find it hard to say that Astell judged wrongly. (121)
It is this strong voice that propels Staves’ remarkable book, and only on occasion does her assuredness, particularly when dismissive, give pause. On occasion she rejects a sympathetic reading as unproductive pity. For example, in her case against Delariviere Manley: “She was sometimes alert to the dangerousness of a male gallantry that conceals male predation, yet desperately clung to a debased form of the old language of love, [and] insisted that her heroines have power to compel male admiration” (165). There is much to recommend this position, yet surely it was more than sometimes that Manley identified this predatory instinct. While addressing scholars who have defended Manley’s political brand of libertinism, Staves has no time for apologetic readings of women, nor does she offer them anywhere in her work.
In later chapters the attention to the bluestockings, especially with reference to genre and the importance of women’s reconsideration of the history of romance, draws the study to a strong conclusion. Throughout, Staves addresses the quandry faced by modern feminist critics in reading the competitive space between “the relative allegiances [eighteenth-century women] ought to owe to gender” and a “range of other values” (439). Fittingly, Staves concludes with a gesture to the via media, condemning the practice of “[r]uthlessly interrogating the works of earlier women writers primarily to fault them according to whether they commit solecisms in terms of modern feminist or democratic political standards” along with “tortured readings of their works that reinvent earlier women writers as modern feminists” (439). We are called to rethink what have become stock responses to these works, the reading and teaching of which have been hard-won. Further, she introduces so many texts, both better- and lesser-known, in this study, that inspiring possibilities are suggested even to the most well-read enthusiast and the most complacent teacher. Ever reader-friendly, Staves includes a generous list of recommended modern editions.
I am teaching a course on eighteenth-century women writers that has become a stock part of my own repertoire, and A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain is not allowed to stray far from my desk. Any serious scholar of early women writers must own this book. As an aid to research it is a treat, as a teaching resource, a trove; as a meditation on what we are all about in our current reading of early women’s texts, a challenge.
