Elizabeth Kraft

The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe / Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis

The study of women Romantic poets has recently been enriched by two works—one an edition, one a critical monograph—that speak not only to the vitality and significance of the individual poets but also to the way Romanticism itself has been remapped over the past forty or fifty years. These works build on the diligent work of scholars such as Harriet Linkin and William McCarthy, both credited with “singlehandedly” reviving interest, respectively, in Mary Tighe and Anna Letitia Barbauld (though in the latter case I seem to remember having lent a hand or two). Paula R. Feldman and Brian C. Cooney have produced what will long stand as the definitive edition of the poetry of Tighe. E. J. Clery has presented what will long stand as the definitive reading of the significance of the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a revisionist reading that calls conventional assumptions, beliefs, and interpretations into question. In a sense, both of these publications speak to endings that occurred at the close of the first decade of the nineteenth century. Mary Tighe died in 1810 at the age of thirty-seven. Her collected poetry was published the following year. And while Anna Letitia Barbauld would live until 1825, dying at the age of eighty-one, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven would be her final major poetic statement and would long be said (though erroneously) to be the poem that ended her career. But even with regard to the lives of the writers themselves, the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century marked beginnings: the publication of Tighe’s works founded a reputation that inspired the next generation of poets, most significantly John Keats (though he later repudiated her work); the publication of Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the critical response it provoked set in motion a narrative about Barbauld that colored her reception and reputation for over a century. Both volumes under consideration here seek even newer beginnings—breaks from received wisdom made possible by re-examination of documentary evidence and re-envisioning of contextual history. I will begin with Tighe. Repudiation notwithstanding, no one familiar with Keats’s odes can read the following lines in Mary Tighe’s Psyche without hearing (to quote Keats himself) “melodies” of his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740 by Michael Austin (review)

of endless political stalemates that stymie the play’s men. Trotter’s Constantia teaches her husband to moderate his uxorious passions so that they can serve their country as conjugal as well as patriotic partners. For Mr. Wilson, female civic agents who preserve national well-being (while operating on very different sentimental and emotional registers) differ from the restrictive models of women patriots in Thomson’s Sophonisba and Edward and Eleanora. A single-minded patriot completely devoted to her country, Sophonisba, is no less than a ‘‘public-spirited monster’’ because she is ‘‘unapologetically a political agent who has long since suppressed her faculties for private emotional response.’’ And without the ‘‘tenderness and intimacy requisite for social love’’ Sophonisba fails as an onstage patriot, neither able to defend Carthage adequately nor to move her audience to nationalistic fellow-feeling. Eleanora, unlike Sophonisba, is a ‘‘female patriot who understands how private intimacies can be constitutive of a surpassing public spirit that is not abstract or austere but itself tender and compassionate.’’ Thus, she becomes ‘‘the catalytic agent for a transnational public that affiliates Christian and Muslim under the aegis of virtue and humanity.’’ Eleanora’s success as a civic agent indicates the importance of emotion to the Whig discourse that Mr. Wilson traces. His study also offers new ways to think about the intertwining of politics and sentiment. In the civic arena, his females successfully wield the language of personal emotion and domestic tenderness. Contributing to the growing scholarship that challenges a rigidly gendered private/public division, his book significantly suggests new ways of reading she-tragedy. Aparna Gollapudi Colorado State University

The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne (review)

tions and Delany’s own catalogue of her work, and the obsolescence of some of the names she gave her plants make this concordance, a painstaking record by John Edmondson of the Linnaean Society of London and taxonomist Charles Nelson, necessary for future research on the scientific aspect of her work. Edmondson’s essay in the volume, ‘‘Novelty in Nomenclature: The Botanical Horizons of Mary Delany,’’ argues that in some cases, Delany’s illustrations marked the first use of unpublished names for species not yet identified in the prevailing Linnaean binomial system of plant taxonomy. Along with prominent figures in natural history such as John Stuart, Earl of Bute, Georg Dionysius Ehret, and Dr. John Fothergill, Delany was an important contributor in the English adoption of the new scientific taxonomy in the period. She authored the name ‘‘Olea odoratissima Soland’’ (named for botanist Daniel Solander) for the West Indian plant now known as Osmanthus fragrans, as well as ‘‘Erinus venustus’’ for the South African plant now known as Selago ovata. While many Linnaean plant names, including these, were lost in the transformation of natural history by the discoveries of the nineteenth century, the Linnaean system introduced the style of binomial attribution still in use today. Was there anything the accomplished Delany could not do? Her hitherto unpublished novel Marianna, transcribed for this volume by Ms. Weisberg-Roberts from one of two surviving manuscripts, combines a juicy roman à clef, in which members of the Delany circle are represented under classical names, with a Walpolean gothic tale of kidnapping, shipwreck, and lost identity. The volume also reproduces the four drawings Delany made to illustrate her tale. Here we see the artist’s characteristic landscape style, in which Italianate vistas complete with classical ruins, are framed by foregrounded trees, rivers, and roads. A valuable addition to the Delany oeuvre, the novel is now available for scholars. This superb book will ensure that she does not disappear from sight again. Lisa L. Moore University of Texas, Austin

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency Inventing Genre by Paula R. Backscheider, and: Women and Poetry: 1660–1750 ed. by Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (review)

Leapor’s Poems Upon Several Occasions (1748). Organizing her coverage of these years around the metaphor of family relationships, Ms. Staves devotes most of her discussion to the way three women negotiated their careers with powerful male siblings or surrogate fathers. Chapters three and four, which I found especially instructive, offer discussions of several plays by Susanna Centlivre, a verse tragedy by Trotter, and the poetry and prose of Mary Wortley Montagu. All of the chapters follow a four-fold plan: a chronological outline of works to be covered; an introductory overview of the period; a detailed commentary on writers and works; a summary conclusion. Overall, while Ms. Staves resists the simple rise-and-fall plot driving other feminist histories, she does not eschew plot altogether. Her book tells a story of the ‘‘rise of the woman writer,’’ whose combined achievements and compromises she calls ‘‘bittersweet.’’ Her history is consistently useful and inspiring from its Introduction to its Select Bibliography. I faced disappointment only twice during my reading: first, when I consulted the Index to search a topic relating to Cavendish and was directed to a page that discussed Lennox; second, when I looked in vain for material on Jane Barker’s Galesia Trilogy (1726). As a nonconformist (exiled Catholic) and a talented eccentric, Barker would seem to deserve a place, but these are small faults. While not the first work to call for a fresh, more positive approach to feminist literary history, it exemplifies a new direction for the history of eighteenth-century women’s writing. Deborah Heller Western New Mexico University

Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 ed. by George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (review)

ally there’’ to the tautological assertion that lesbian literary history should be understood ‘‘in conjunction with history.’’ The final two eighteenth-century essays of the volume, both concerned with the specifics of writing eighteenthcentury literary histories of women, draw respectively on the completed ongoing projects of their authors: Antonia Forster and James Raven’s, English Novels, 1770–1829 (2000) and Susan Staves’s Longman’s History of Women’s Writing. Ms. Forster describes how her amassing of bibliographical information from searches of contemporary advertisements and reviews gives a fuller sense of women novelists’ careers than was previously possible through the ESTC. Ms. Staves’s ‘‘Terminus a Quo, Terminus ad Quem: Chronological Boundaries in a Literary History’’responds directly to the declared aims of the volume’s Introduction with her rigorous theoretical grounding of literary history as a distinct genre. From the summary historiography of predecessor works, she concludes that chronology offers the most useful organizing principle for such an exercise. While the terms of her inquiry have been set by the Longman series’ designated subject of women’s writing, and she is consequently released from the need to question closely this categorical restriction, she nevertheless demonstrates as convincingly as the other contributors to the volume, the advantages of feminists’ readings that are ‘‘less narcissistically obsessed with the sufferings of women and more broadly intellectually engaged with significant literary and political debates of the day.’’ As with the essays contributed by Ms. Schellenberg, Ms. Hobby, and Ms. King, the turn here from apologetics or exceptionalism to detailed contextual explorations of women’s writing advances both the refiguring of feminist criticism and, more largely, of literary history as a workable category of inquiry. April London University of Ottawa