British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789–1832

232 Pages·2004·0.834 MB·English

by  Mary A. Waters (auth.)

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
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Titles include:
E. J. Clery
THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN 18TH-CENTURY ENGLAND
Literature, Commerce and Luxury
Mary Waters
BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROFESSION OF LITERARY CRITICISM,
1789–1832
Forthcoming titles in the series:
Adriana Craciun
BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
David Simpson, Nigel Leask and Peter de Bolla (editors)
LAND, NATION AND CULTURE, 1740–1810
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British Women Writers and
the Profession of Literary
Criticism, 1789–1832
Mary A. Waters
Assistant Professor
Wichita State University
© Mary A. Waters 2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-3626-4
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waters, Mary A., 1954–
British women writers and the profession of literary criticism,
1789–1832 / Mary A. Waters.
p. cm. – (Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism, and the
cultures of print)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Criticism–Great Britain–History–19th century. 2. English
prose literature–Women authors–History and criticism. 3. Women and
literature–Great Britain–History–19th century. 4. Women and
literature–Great Britain–History–18th century. 5. English literature–History
and criticism–Theory, etc. 6. Book reviewing–Great Britain–History–
19th century. 7. Book reviewing–Great Britain–History–18th century.
8 Criticism–Great Britain–History–18th century. 9. Women critics–Great
Britain. I. Title. II. Series.
PR75.W36 2004
820.9′9287′09034–dc22 2004044686
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
In Memory of Annie Mary
and Myrtle
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Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
Part I “Forms scientific and established”: The Critical Preface,
the Canon, and the Woman Critic 25
1 The British Common Reader: Critical Prefaces by
Anna Letitia Barbauld 28
2 Renouncing the Forms: The Case of Elizabeth Inchbald 57
Part II “Fearful ascendency”: Women Periodical Literary
Reviewers 83
3 “The first of a new genus –”: Mary Wollstonecraft,
Mary Hays, and The Analytical Review 86
4 Periodicals and Middle-Class Dissent: Anna Letitia
Barbauld and Elizabeth Moody at the Monthly Review 121
5 The Next Generation: Harriet Martineau’s Literary Reviews
for the Monthly Repository 151
Notes 178
Bibliography 206
Index 217
vii
Acknowledgments
Many individuals and organizations have encouraged and supported
me in this project, and to them all I owe my deepest appreciation. A
few, however, deserve special mention. I would like to thank Kari
Lokke, Catherine Robson, and David Simpson for their enthusiastic
and challenging readings of early drafts. In particular, Kari Lokke has
been a source of encouragement and inspiration since long before the
germ of this study took form. Discussions with Alessa Johns during the
project’s early stages helped me to sort out the shape the project would
take. Jan Wellington and Gina Luria Walker read portions of the
manuscript as it developed and offered timely and insightful sugges-
tions. Library staff at Shields Library at UC Davis and Bancroft Library
at UC Berkeley also receive my thanks, but Nancy Kushigian at Shields
deserves special recognition for her valuable research assistance. UC
Davis has provided a variety of grants and fellowships, large and small,
that have made the research for this project possible. Portions of
Chapters 3 and 4 have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Prose and
Eighteenth-Century Studies, and I thank the editors of those journals
for permission to include that material here. And finally, my deepest
gratitude goes to Noel Phipps, without whose generosity, faith, and
encouragement this project would never have arrived at completion.
viii
Introduction
All men of sense, who know the world, have a great deference
for [women’s] judgment of such books as lie within the
compass of their knowledge, and repose more confidence in
the delicacy of their taste, though unguided by rules, than in
all the dull labors of pedants and commentators.
– David Hume1
In 1977, Susan Sniader Lanser and Evelyn Torton Beck asked a pro-
vocative question: “Why are there no great women critics?”2 Their
query was in part rhetorical, for in the very essay to which it gives title,
they go on to offer examples of women critics whose work fails to
receive its due in standard anthologies and histories of criticism.
Names such as Charlotte Lennox, Clara Reeve, and Vernon Lee provide
them with instances of groundbreaking women’s criticism that since
its first appearance has been largely dismissed.3 Lanser and Beck
suggest that women’s criticism fails to garner the respect it deserves
partly because the difference in perspective between women writers
and their male counterparts shapes women’s compositions in ways
that make them an ill fit with standards and concerns subsequently
developed by men from writing by men. Hence, though women’s crit-
icism may have been well regarded in its day, it was soon forgotten or,
if remembered at all, held up to “some pre-established norms” against
which it is “judged to be defective.”4
One could surely argue that since Lanser and Beck’s essay first
appeared, women’s criticism has begun to come into its own. After all,
the work of a woman writer, Virginia Woolf, makes the only complete
book-length critical essay in that standard of English literary studies, the
Norton Anthology of English Literature.5Lanser herself has helped edit one
1