Revising women : eighteenth-century "women's fiction" and social engagement

Revising Women is a collection of essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of the English novel, to our understanding of literature's place in cultural debate, and to women's studies. The essays give steady attention to the ways novels participate in social processes and the ways women perceived the public sphere and stubbornly attempted to participate in it. Rich contextualization and adept use of theory reveal both the individual writer's story and the story beneath the text that is a cultural production with the potential to reveal why we and our society are as we are. Each essay develops ways of using history in relation to literature, takes up large historical events and issues, and interprets in fine detail what individuals do with them. Beginning with the fictions of the late seventeenth century, and ending with Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, the essays in Revising Women are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and dedicated attention to the interrelationships between life and literary works and between everyday existence and political processes.

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In her preface, Backscheider (Auburn Univ.) makes high claims for this collection as the fruit of several lifetimes' feminist rereading of 18th-century fiction. These claims turn out to be justified by a truly extraordinary book. Revising Women brings together five long literary-historical essays, all of the highest merit: Betty Rizzo traces the uses of Gothic plots and motifs by women (and homosexual male) writers of the period; Mitzi Meyers outlines a completely new reading of Maria Edgeworth, based in a new understanding of Edgeworth's relations to the powerful men in her family; and in an essay titled "Jane Austen and the Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy," Barbara Benedict reexamines reading practices in light of contemporary notions of taste, display, and "the feminization of discriminating choice." Perhaps best of all are Backscheider's own contributions: a long introductory overview of 18th-century women's fiction and "The Rise of Gender as a Political Category," arguably the best single essay yet written on Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa. Collections of this sort are often uneven or thin, or repeat work already done; this one is so uniformly fresh, exciting, and useful that it deserves a place in all academic collections serving upper-division undergraduates and above. D. L. Patey; Smith College

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