Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Ula Lukszo Klein

University of Virginia Press, 2021. 258pp. $32.50. ISBN 978-0813945514.

Review by Robin Runia, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Sapphic Crossings offers a timely update to scholarship exploring cross-dressed women in the eighteenth century. Specifically, this study examines multiple genres according to their representations of same-sex desire and transgendered bodies/identities. In so doing, Ula Lukszo Klein’s work is directly engaged in redirecting the focus of past scholarship on how female cross-dressing appealed to the male gaze and reinforced heterosexual desire by, in fact, destabilizing definitions of man and woman as well as masculine and feminine. While the title reflects the author’s acknowledgement of the anachronism involved in applying the term “lesbian” to describe eighteenth-century texts, Sapphic Crossings is intensely interested in how, in the chosen texts, cross-dressing women and the women they attracted might shed light on today’s butch-femme lesbian relationships. Klein builds on previous recognition of the cross-dressers’ attractive gender indeterminacy to offer four anatomical-metaphorical lenses through which to recognize sexual and gender fluidity in the period.

Klein organizes her volume according to these lenses, eschewing more typical generic or chronological methods. Each chapter analyzes how a different piece of physical anatomy becomes crucial to a cross-dressing woman’s ability or inability to function as a man or provide a convincing performance of masculinity. Chapter 1 focuses on the beard. Klein reviews how the beard’s status historically as a symbol of masculinity and wisdom is challenged by eighteenth-century British preferences for clean-shaven faces, and she acknowledges how this androgynous look corresponded to racial stereotypes supporting British imperial projects but also enabled women to function in male roles. Klein’s attention to the desire that androgynous, beautiful, and feminine men aroused in other women helps her develop the metaphorical register of the beard. The ability of the cross-dressed woman to attract other women means that the seduced woman functions as a “beard” testifying to the cross-dresser’s masculine identity even in the absence of the physical beard.

The three subsequent chapters are organized similarly. Chapter 2 explores how viewing the cross-dresser’s breasts did not always mean that he was revealed to be a she. Instead, the “bosom” of the cross-dresser, as a place of intense feeling or source of bravery, often attracted other women, reinforcing the role of such women as “beards” or rendering them “bosom friends.” Chapter 3 focuses on the ability of the female cross-dresser’s skill with a dildo or other penis replacement to threaten the primacy of anatomy in defining men or masculinity, and chapter 4 explores how bare legs were attractive to both men and women but doubly so for women in their representation of social mobility and independence. These metaphors beautifully exemplify the difficulties that readers have had in recognizing trans identities despite awareness of the slippery workings of sexual anatomy in relation to gendered desire.

The book focuses primarily on mid-century British texts: Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband (1746), The Female Soldier; or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750), Sarah Scott’s A Journey Through Every Stage of Life (1754), The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, the British Amazon, Commonly Called Mother Ross (1741), John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), a translation of Giovanni Bianchi’s An Historical and Physical Dissertation on the Case of Catherine Vizzani (1751), A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke Written by Herself (1755), and James Quin’s The Life of Mrs. James Quin, Comedian (1766). These texts clearly and compellingly argue for a popular fascination with the female cross-dresser in Britain in the mid-century. Klein proves how, in novels and pamphlets and on the stage, women were attracted to women who dressed as men and who assumed roles traditionally limited to men as soldiers, husbands, and rakes.

Klein offers two additional texts from the late eighteenth century to insist on the sapphic possibilities that cross-dressing allowed even in works that appear to reject gender ambiguity: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801)and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791). Belinda features in the second chapter’s argument about bosoms and the last chapter’s argument about legs to read Lady Delacour, Harriet Freke, and the eponymous heroine Belinda as a love triangle. While Klein’s attention to Delacour and Freke’s relationship does indeed remind us that the two women’s cross-dressing led to the wound in Delacour’s bosom, Delacour’s later “unbosoming” of herself to Belinda in light of Freke’s heartlessness does not seem quite to merit description as same sex desire. More convincing is Klein’s reading of the injury to Freke’s legs, and thus to cross-dressed mobility. In punishing the advantage to which Freke’s bared legs had previously appeared, Edgeworth certainly admits to the possibility of women’s attraction to other cross-dressed women, but the plot point also functions as a punishment for Freke’s previous gender ambiguity. In contrast, the last chapter’s discussion of Miss Milner’s cross-dressing in Inchbald’s novel provides an astute and attentive reading of same sex desire manifested between the novel’s heroine and her friend and constant companion, Miss Woodley.

The volume ends with a “Coda” that focuses on aid provided to the female soldier Hannah Snell by a Black woman. The fact of this woman’s passing mention, her race, and her aid in treatment of Snell’s injury to the groin leads Klein to insist on a queer reading of this textual moment and of this Black woman as another sort of “beard.” Such insistence follows Klein’s earlier claims that the absence of the cross-dresser’s beard manifested British imperialist racism and that the cross-dresser’s bare legs manifested ableism. I wonder, however, if the excellent examples highlighted throughout Sapphic Crossings of cross-dressed women becoming better men than men while not being men might also encourage us to consider how cross-dressing might trouble other supposedly stable identities.

Robin Runia is Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana.

African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment by Rebekah Mitsein

University of Virginia Press, 2022. 294pp. $35. ISBN 978-0813947907.

Review by Steven W. Thomas, Wagner College, New York City, New York, United States

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European writers were impressed by the stories they read of African empires such as Mali, Songhai, and Abyssinia, and readers of Rebekah Mitsein’s new book will be impressed by the range of texts she analyzes and the connections she makes across the archive to demonstrate how the British imagination of Africa was in some ways influenced by the “strategies of self-representation” of a cosmopolitan African elite (1). In African Impressions, Mitsein makes the argument that European “impressions” of Africa were in part shaped by African “expressions.” This book will be of great interest to scholars and teachers of English literature as Mitsein places a range of canonical works from Shakespeare’s Othello and Milton’s Paradise Lost to Behn’s Oronoko, Defoe’s Captain Singleton, and Johnson’s Rasselas alongside lesser-known works including Richard Zouche’s Dove: Or, Passages of Cosmography, travel narratives by Portuguese missionaries and emissaries, and the work of North Africans from Leo Africanus to Abba Gorgoryos.

Mitsein challenges the assumptions that, for the English reader, Africa was the metaphorical “blank space” on the map, and she complicates the well-known arguments of Edward Said and V.Y. Mudimbe that, in European discourse, “Africa” was a racist invention and a figure of otherness. Instead, she builds on the work of literary scholars (Wendy Belcher, Roxann Wheeler, Mary Louise Pratt) and historians (Herman Bennett and Michael Gomez) to uncover how Africans “exerted agency in the contact zone” (8). African Impressions is a useful contribution to the ongoing project to deconstruct the archive in order to recover Black voices and Black life, furthered by the scholarship of Jennifer Morgan, Saidiya Hartman, Nicole Aljoe, Cassander Smith, Kim Hall, and others. Moreover, although the focus is on what Mitsein calls the “early Enlightenment” when, in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, European writers began to reflect philosophically on new empirical data, her book has a much longer historical view as she considers the significance of a range of earlier texts, such as accounts of the famously wealthy Mansa Musa I’s pilgrimage to Mecca and Ethiopia’s national epic Kebre Negast in the fourteenth century. My impression is that Mitsein’s analysis of how stories from Africa were repeated, revised, and continued to influence European writers centuries later could be considered an example of what literary theorist Wai Chee Dimock calls “deep time.” To make her argument, Mitsein has done thorough archival research to demonstrate how specific ideas of African history and geography were recycled, adapted, debated, pondered over, and revised across the centuries.

Chapter 1 begins with Mansa Musa I of Mali, who was reputed to be one of the wealthiest kings in the entire world in the fourteenth century. The publicity of his hajj was part of a broader strategy to manage his vast global network of political and economic relations. Later, as Europeans began to explore Africa to locate the sources of the gold trade in Africa, they relied heavily on texts about the Mali and Songhai empires and on local informants. In light of the popularity of these stories about Islamic empires in sub-Saharan Africa, Mitsein argues for an appreciation of the African-ness of Shakespeare’s Othello.

Her next two chapters use this archive of the trans-Saharan trade as a foundation for reinterpreting fictional accounts of Africa, such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720). The chapter on Defoe differs in some ways from the other chapters because his texts could be read as a counterpoint to the rest of Mitsein’s argument. Defoe does often represent Africa as a blank and as a racist figure of otherness, but Mitsein demonstrates that, even when he suppresses the positive information that he certainly knew about, “African expressions” still influenced his writing.

The next three chapters focus on the case of Ethiopia, beginning not with European travellers to that region of Africa, but earlier with Abyssinian emissaries travelling to Europe, the legend of an African Christian king named Prester John, and the iconic figure of Queen Sheba. Of particular interest is a historical debate during the Renaissance and “early Enlightenment” about the location of the biblical city of Ophir, from where King Solomon derived so much of his wealth. Mitsein demonstrates how English poets such as Milton and Dyer took seriously African claims of its location in the southern part of the continent. After Abyssinia and Portugal formed a strategic alliance in the sixteenth century, a complex discourse about Ethiopia emerged, some of which, Mitsein argues, was influenced and directed by Ethiopian intellectuals and monarchs, especially two of Abyssinia’s travellers to Europe: Saga za Ab and Abba Gorgoryos. This discourse influenced how the English imagined Ethiopia, most famously the writings of Samuel Johnson, the topic of the penultimate chapter.

Mitsein’s last chapter focuses on James Bruce’s close relationship to women in Abyssinia’s royal family, represented in his voluminous Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790). Although some critics might argue that Bruce presents them as Pocahontas-like figures, Mitsein argues that he respects them as complex and savvy political actors who drove his perceptions.

Mitsein’s contribution will no doubt spur further research on some of the complex, ongoing debates in the field. One question, in light of her argument about “African impressions,” is how we understand “race” and the racist discourse that emerged in Europe concomitant with their colonial endeavours. How might we analyze such romantic accounts of African kings and queens alongside texts that denigrate and dehumanize other peoples of the African continent? Did Europeans see the empires of Mali and Ethiopia as representative of Africa or as exceptional? For example, since the 1960s historians of Ethiopia have been grappling with the genealogy of a discourse sometimes called “Ethiopian exceptionalism” or “Ethiopianism” in which Ethiopia is figured as an exception to the rest of Africa. A second question concerns the issue of African kings and queens in relation to the diversity of peoples on the African continent. For example, the Eritrean anthropologist Asmarom Legesse has remarked in Oromo Democracy (2000; 2006) that European and American writing about Africa persists in characterizing the history of African social organization in terms of kingdoms, which, he argues, is a reflection of the West’s own biases and political goals. His work instead highlights Indigenous forms of democracy such as the “Gadaa system” of the Oromo ethnic group in Ethiopia that played an important role in the political dynamics between Abyssinia and Europe in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Arguably, one thing missing from Mitsein’s focus on the Abyssinian monarchy is the cultural diversity of that region and the other forms of political organization that existed there. Nevertheless, the insightful connections she makes across that archive offers rich ground for future scholarship on these questions.

Steven W. Thomas is a professor of English at Wagner College, New York. He has published scholarly articles on eighteenth-century British poetry, early American literature, pirate narratives, representations of the eighteenth century in movies, Ethiopian-American novels, and African cinema.

Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization by Stephanie DeGooyer

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 216pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-1421443928.

Review by David Hollingshead, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Let me begin with an unequivocal endorsement: anyone with even a passing interest in the fields of novels studies or law and literature will find Before Borders deeply rewarding to read. It is historically rich, rigorously researched, and confidently polemical in ways I will elaborate below. But this monograph should be of interest to scholars regardless of expertise as a pedagogical document, one that expertly models the rhetorical move of the scholarly intervention, what we sometimes call the “so what?” question of research work. What begins, in the first chapter, as an exegesis of underexamined seventeenth-century juridical documents that reimagined political subjectivity following the Union of the English and Scottish Crowns quickly coalesces into a set of powerful claims that bear heavily on contemporary understandings of the novel, the nation, and the concept of naturalization in literary studies. Moving briskly between early modern legal theory (Blackstone, Locke, Bacon), canonical works of fiction (Richardson, Defoe, Burney, Mary Shelley), and contemporary criticism (Arendt, Barthes, Benedict Anderson, Jacques Rancière), Stephanie DeGooyer always keeps a keen eye on her study’s high argumentative stakes.

As the title suggests, Before Borders seeks to complicate through historicization the modern narrative of the nation-state in crisis—a narrative diagnosed most acutely by Hannah Arendt (and explored by DeGooyer in her 2018 co-authored study The Right to Have Rights) wherein the consolidation of strict territorial borders in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century furnishes the political conditions for the mass denaturalization and legalized statelessness of the twentieth century. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),Arendt speaks obliquely of the “happier predecessors” of modern refugees whose mobility as political subjects had not yet been foreclosed by the juridical imbrication of human rights and citizenship status. Before Borders takes this unelaborated supposition as its starting point: What didthe transit of persons across (and their integration within) pre-national communities look like, and how did novelists, philosophers, and legal theorists enact, support, and contest those conditions? DeGooyer is understandably less sanguine than Arendt on the “freedoms” of premodern immigration; Before Borders consistently underscores that trans-European mobility was almost exclusively the province of the wealthy, white, and able-bodied. Nevertheless, DeGooyer finds in early naturalization statutes a set of conceptual openings for rethinking dominant accounts of the linkage between subjectivity, belonging, and the work of cultural production.

What are these conceptual openings? First, early modern naturalization was remarkably indifferent to the issue of cultural nationalism, which underwrites both contemporary immigration discourse and discussions of the early novel: “Rather than assimilate foreigners to the cultural narratives of the nation-state, naturalization sought to fictionally recreate natural allegiance for foreigners through a dispassionately bureaucratic process that had nothing yet to do with interiority or felt belonging” (34). Beginning with a debate over whether Scottish subjects could inherit property in England following unification in 1603, early legal theorists of naturalization answered the question “What did it mean to be English?” in surprisingly flat terms: it meant being treated as if one were born in England for legal purposes. Naturalization created new subjects, but it did so in a way distinct from the dominant narrative of subject formation that has traditionally grounded novel studies. Rather than appeal to realism’s grammar of psychological depth, fellow feeling, and Bildung-ishgrowth, naturalization invoked a mechanics of flatness, artifice, and historical erasure. Through the legal fiction of naturalization, one’s identity was transformed irrespective of feeling, belief, or nativity.

Before Borders takes its place alongside important work in novel studies, including Sandra MacPherson’s Harm’s Way (2019), D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (2003), and Stephanie Hershinow’s Born Yesterday (2019), that challenges the dominance of the reflexive, affectively attuned, self-disciplining liberal individual as both producer and product of the novelistic imagination. Unlike the term’s usage in contemporary criticism, which inevitably denotes a process of mystification (the transformation of “history into nature,” as Barthes put it), early modern naturalization was not a mechanism for rendering identities timeless or universal. Both its artificiality and its contingency were always explicit, and the “nature” it created was not an ideological deception (although it certainly inaugurated the problem of multiple and duplicitous territorial allegiances) so much as a political and economic expedient.

Nowhere do these features of flatness, impersonality, and expediency converge in a more illuminating way than in DeGooyer’s reading of Robinson Crusoe (1719), the liberal individual par excellence of novel studies. Her analysis begins with a fascinating opening gambit: What if the most important detail in Crusoe’s narrative—one that not only guides his trajectory but also gestures toward a theory of political subjectivity at odds with the novel’s most canonical interpretations—is hiding in plain sight in its opening sentence, when Crusoe explains that his father is a German-born naturalized English merchant? DeGooyer makes a persuasive case for situating legal naturalization of the kind Crusoe himself undertakes when he becomes a Portuguese citizen in order to purchase the slave plantation, the eventual source of his wealth, as the novel’s hitherto unarticulated political logic. DeGooyer’s instinct for rhetorical positioning is on fine display: to read Crusoe as a subject of naturalization—wherein identities bend to economic advantage, cross national boundaries, and are indifferent to questions of interiority or belief—is to read against the grain of much Robinson Crusoe scholarship, which has often positioned the novel as emblematic of both an emergent English cultural nationalism as well as the genre of the Protestant autobiography.

The opportunities for future scholarship that Before Borders encourages are compelling. While reading, I often found myself drawing connections between DeGooyer’s descriptions of naturalization’s hypothetical mode—that is, we know you are not X but rather Y, yet you will nevertheless be treated as if you were always X without ever disavowing Y—and Catherine Gallagher’s influential account of fictional referentiality inaugurated by the novel form (“The Rise of Fictionality,” 2006). For Gallagher, the novel’s historical uniqueness is that it tells “believable stories that [do] not solicit belief” (340). Reading novels means simultaneously knowing that its referents are not real yet proceeding as if they were, and doing so does not compromise the form’s referentiality but rather expands its parameters: in the words of Henry Fielding, novels represent “not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species” (Joseph Andrews [1742]). To accede to the criteria of novelistic truth is thus to accede to the test of verisimilitude: Is this character behaving in a way that conforms to its status as a particular species of individual? A number of DeGooyer’s readings argue for seeing novels as tools for naturalizing (in the sense of politically authorizing) the perspective of groups previously excluded from the realm of credibility: poor servant girls in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or “creatures” without legal status or nativity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Legal naturalization and novelistic representation thus share a suspension of reference (we know you are not actually English/a real servant girl) that is simultaneously a dilation of reference (yet your provisional status as such expands the boundaries of who can potentially belong to that group in the first place). It is worth asking whether the novel’s unique representational mode—which Gallagher herself likens to the form of the “legal fiction,” a recognized untruth invoked for the purpose of convenience or expediency—shares a connection to legal naturalization beyond just analogy given that they seem to mobilize the same cognitive infrastructure.

There are certain moments in Before Borders where readers familiar with the primary sources may desire more engagement, specifically because the implications for DeGooyer’s arguments feel crucial. In the final full chapter, DeGooyer offers an extended engagement with Frankenstein to theorize what she calls “narrative naturalization,” whereby authors “use the genre of prose fiction itself to redress failures of legal naturalization to represent and incorporate religious and racial outsiders” (146). In contrast to recent biopolitical readings of the novel by scholars like Emily Steinlight, who see in Frankenstein’s machinations the ascendance of a “contraceptive futurism” that would preoccupy race theorists through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, 2018), DeGooyer argues for the Creature’s ultimate success in establishing the grounds for its naturalization: “the Creature stages his membership in a national community by revealing the impossible logic that would try to reject him from it” (160). Yet, if the ground of the Creature’s exclusion is indeed its “racialization,” as DeGooyer notes, the status of race as a term in this section is slightly underdeveloped. In an earlier reading of Frances Burney, DeGooyer will concede that “race ultimately cannot be liberalized in the same manner as nationality” and that “the idea that racial appearance confirmed biological and cultural inferiority would gain more traction in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (138). Frankenstein addresses this very shift in its account of the Creature’s education at the De Lacey cottage, where he learns of “the slothful Asiatics … the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians” (144), and he consistently refers to himself in the colonialist language of immutable physiological difference. DeGooyer does not address these moments, leaving a reader to wonder how the failure of racial naturalization in Burney becomes successful in Shelley.

These opportunities for refinement are minor given the exciting inroads Beyond Borders makes at the intersection of novel studies and law and literature. It is a text that demands reckoning with for its insights in immigration history, its theoretical contributions to the concept of naturalization, and its provocative interventions into dominant accounts of the connections between novels, nations, and the production of subjectivity.

David Hollingshead is Assistant Professor of English at MacEwan University.

We Are Kings: Political Theology and the Making of a Modern Individual by Spencer Jackson

University of Virginia Press, 2020. 230pp. $32.50. ISBN 978-0813944722.

Review by Minji Huh, SUNY Albany, New York, United States

While many critical works have renegotiated Ian Watt’s linear understanding of the interrelationships between the various historical and social developments of the eighteenth century and the “birth” of the novel, some still latch on to hegemonic liberal secularism. Spencer Jackson’s intervention uses the lens of political theology, a term developed by Carl Schmitt to emphasize the power of sovereignty rather than norms in order to critique liberalism on the whole. Jackson’s point, however, is to critically engage liberalism. In proposing a nonsecular account of Western modernity, he contends that sovereignty in the theological sense did not vanish when the older society’s stratifying techniques were overthrown, but rather became absorbed within a concept of the people. Influenced by Marx, Jackson employs political theology to renew our understanding of secular modernity as a reformulation of religion, but he also departs from Marx’s fundamentally economist argument by focusing on the cultural aspect of capitalist modernity—that is, theological nationalism (5–6). This, in part, is to undermine Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s diagnosis in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; 1972) that art is in compliance with the commodified world (7). We Are Kings aims to highlight not the beacon of subjection but rather the hope that resides in the individual, whose divinity is inherited from the British kings in the context of a historically grounded continuity.

An ambivalence about orthodox understandings of Western modernity merits particular attention in We Are Kings. Jackson’s view of eighteenth-century Britain may in part correspond to Bruno Latour’s assessment of modernity in that it still lacks a decisive and revolutionary break from whatever values and norms lodged in the realm of the past or the premodern. Throughout four chapters, Jackson addresses the naturalization of liberal secularism, which upholds the value of transition from a purportedly religious past to a secular future. Whereas in a secularized history, the linkage between two genres that stand at opposite ends of the literary spectrum—Tory Augustan verse and domestic fiction—is largely ignored, Jackson attempts to delineate a genealogy of the notion of freedom from the neoclassical heroes imagined by Tory Augustans to the self-conscious individuals in domestic fiction.

Chapter 1 examines how the figure of the patriot constructed by John Dryden endows the notion of subjectivity with new cultural meaning in relation to simultaneously championing and controlling the mob’s revolutionary power. It is in chapter 2 that Jackson notes how individualism concurs with nationalism by pointing out an analogy between the poet and the nation in Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1713). Yet Jackson is concerned with Pope’s invocation of nonhuman lives as replacements of subjects under sovereign power via the description of a new sort of authority that can be universalized. Here, Jackson hints at how the rhetoric of early British nationalism supports the genesis of racism, which he further investigates in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 highlights an analogy for slavery that is centralized in domestic novels: for example, Samuel Richardson’s heroine Clarissa is an exceptional figure who chooses death or submission to God over obedience to patriarchal authorities like her brother and her husband. In chapter 4, Jackson centralizes the figure of the colonial enslaved person as necessary for the construction of a political subjectivity within an individuated, domestic, and free British subject. However, if Jackson is to take seriously the “possibility for a sovereign, emancipated existence” (112) as the core of a more capacious understanding of Britain’s modernization, his references to slavery are less effective because he exclusively mentions examples from the works of white authors.

All in all, We Are Kings convincingly renegotiates the story of secularism using examples from early eighteenth-century literature which demonstrate that the modern nation did not abandon theology. Most importantly, this revisionist history contributes to theories of biopolitics through debunking the secularization thesis. Instead of assessing the politicization of life as an indicator of modernity, as Michel Foucault argues, Jackson follows Giorgio Agamben’s argument that this phenomenon dates to Roman law and discovers a continuity between the literary representations of divine kings in the seventeenth century and domestic protagonists in the eighteenth century. The internalization of sovereignty found in the eponymous heroine of Richardson’s novel Pamela does not solely appear as a form of obedience but as one of resistance—Jackson’s point is certainly focused on this revolutionary potential for usurpation. His turn toward Alexander Weheliye, however, is quite abrupt and not impactful. Jackson acknowledges that Weheliye’s critique of Western theorists like Foucault and Agamben is important because it underscores the racist nature of the orthodox history of modernity. Yet, for Jackson, Weheliye’s assertion is equally limited to the extent that it is metaphysical, undermining people’s ability to act better and undo racism. The question then is whether the final suggestions in the last chapter of We Are Kings are less abstract than Weheliye’s.

A few other questions remain as to how, in examining the rise of the British empire through literature, focusing on two Catholics like Dryden and Pope might work to denaturalize the ideal version of the founding myth. I believe that the argument would have been more compelling if Jackson had elaborated on how religion’s role in imperial Britain differs from religion’s function in an emerging nation like America, given how John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon has been used to promote the idea of American exceptionalism. It may also be overly optimistic of Jackson to claim that the potential for realizing an egalitarian utopia exists in literary works and can be manifested in a way that overcomes the exclusive notion of the human being. I suggest that classical liberalism cannot be dismissed simply by contemplating the idea of freedom in the case of racial other and understanding the notion of sovereignty as an innate trait of every individual. Consequently, I hesitate to conclude that Jackson’s positive claim about eighteenth-century literature’s potential to reinstate the modern individual as a divine entity is more productive than other critiques of liberalism that point to its regulatory mechanisms as setting limits on freedom.

Minji Huh is a third-year PhD student at SUNY Albany whose research explores representations of emotions in the long eighteenth century as informed by medical humanities, environmental humanities, and postcolonial studies.

British Romanticism and Denmark by Cian Duffy

Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 272pp. $110. ISBN 978-1474498227.

Review by Andrew McKendry, Nord University, Bodø, Nordland, Norway

The historical episode at the heart of British Romanticism and Denmark is an irresistible invitation to intellectual curiosity and scholarly inquiry: at the height of the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen, Horatio Nelson, second in command of the British forces, sent a dispatch to Frederik V of Denmark, addressed not to his “foes” but “to the Brothers of Englishmen; the Danes.” As Cian Duffy demonstrates, this remarkable expression reflected a broader tendency, visible across a wide range of genres and forms, to invoke a Northern culture shared by Britain and Denmark. This regional identity could cut across national identities, a dynamic that “can help us also to refine our understanding of how individual national Romanticisms interacted within and across national borders” (3). While the influence of Scandinavian and Norse traditions on British Romanticism is well known, this book sets out purposefully on a largely untrodden path, examining how British writers represented and responded to the Danish culture of their own day, especially as this response supported or complicated a sense of a common culture. The focus on the Denmark contemporaneous with writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft is both refreshing and instructive, allowing Duffy to foreground important but comparatively lesser-known figures such as the unofficial Anglo-Dutch cultural liaison Andreas Andersen Feldborg, as well as to pursue questions that are germane to current accounts of Romantic nationalism. For example, British Romantic poets turned frequently to Scandinavian traditions, but what did contemporary readers actually think of modern Danish poetry?

This study is divided into five chapters preceded by an introduction and concluded with a coda. The introduction positions British Romanticism and Denmark within a constellation of distinct but interconnected areas of scholarly debate: the European scope and character of Romanticism; the definition of “Romanticism”; the formation of Romantic nationalisms; and the conceptualization of the “North.” The introduction also presents some of the central figures of Duffy’s narrative, such as Robert Molesworth, whose relentlessly critical account of Denmark served as a regular target for subsequent correctives. While perhaps overlong, encroaching unduly on some of Duffy’s best evidence and analysis, this introduction demonstrates a thorough and precise knowledge of these fields, one that allows Duffy to position his research conscientiously and clearly.

The first chapter examines British views of and on Copenhagen, elucidating a trend that Duffy returns to throughout the book: toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, Duffy argues, the tendency to portray Denmark as a “quasi-Oriental Other” (exemplifying the ills of an absolutist monarchy) was gradually displaced by a focus on cultural and political similarity with Britain. This shift was effected partly by British travellers like William Coxe and William Thomson, though Wollstonecraft’s well-known but morose commentary on Denmark throws a bit of a wrench into the works—a complication that Duffy does an adequate job addressing, especially in later chapters. Somewhat paradoxically, it was the military conflict between Britain and Denmark that brought them together; the British assaults on Copenhagen in 1801 and 1807, especially the latter during which the city was bombarded with Congreve rockets, impressed upon the British victors the admirable bravery of the Danish people, as well as their own scandalous brutality.

Though Copenhagen was the main stop and point of interest for British travellers, a modest number travelled throughout Denmark more widely, and it is their “largely unexamined” accounts that Duffy turns to in the second chapter (62). These accounts reflect the same shift toward finding Denmark familiar rather than foreign, here especially in response to Danish monuments, such as the tumuli (mounds of earth and stones over graves), which appeared to some visitors as “evidence of a common, ancient culture, spreading across ‘the North’ between Denmark and Britain” (68). A more recent cultural connection was evoked by (and marketed in) Helsingør, known as not only the setting for the great British play Hamlet, but also the site of the tragic incarceration of Caroline Matilda (granddaughter of King George II of Great Britain and Queen of Denmark and Norway, 1766–72, by marriage to King Christian VII).

The third chapter focuses on British interest in Danish literature—not classical but contemporary. Challenging the tendency to see Anglo-Danish literary influence as a one-way relationship, Duffy argues that the circulation of Danish literature in Britain “constituted a more significant axis of cultural exchange between the two countries than has yet been recognized” (93). Alongside editors and translators like Robert Pearse Gillies, whose “Horae Danicae” series foregrounded modern Danish artists such as Adam Oehlenschläger, this chapter identifies Anglo-Danish connections in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Wordsworth. De Quincey, whose connection to Danish language and culture was established via his brother, provides a solid and interesting point of connection, while Wordsworth is more uncertain but also more intriguing; Duffy tentatively proposes that his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807) was influenced (via their mutual friend Gottfried Friedrich Klopstock) by Jens Baggesen’s “Da jeg var lille” (1801).

Commentary on the Danish “national character” occupies the fourth chapter, in which Duffy situates discussions (ongoing today) about Danish happiness within larger eighteenth-century debates about national character itself—particularly whether such character is shaped by climatological or sociopolitical factors. Speculations about a shared Northern national character are of interest to Duffy here, and he identifies a tendency to position Britons as the modern inheritors of this character, often via a narrative of Danish cultural and physiological decline.

The fifth chapter examines British responses to three features of contemporary Danish politics: the effects of absolute monarchy in Denmark, the collapse of Carolina Matilda’s marriage to King Christian VII in the eighteenth century, and Denmark’s involvement in colonization and the slave trade. While the first element covers much of the same ground as earlier discussions, the second unpacks in persuasive ways the increasingly sentimental, Romantic portrayal of Carolina Matilda (171). Danish involvement in the slave trade also provided some potential common ground with Britain; Danish writers, most notably Feldborg, lauded the shared humanity and sensibility that was ostensibly manifest in the parallel abolition movements of the two nations.

British Romanticism and Denmark is a detailed and precise study, both in terms of its scholarly positioning and research; Duffy synthesizes an array of sources, and he readily grapples with the inevitable complications that such synthesizing work necessarily encounters. On the whole, he makes a convincing case for the importance of contemporary Danish literature and culture, especially as it could contribute to a sense of Northern identity. Yet, Duffy’s distinctive aim—to illustrate the importance and influence of contemporaryDenmark—entails two methodological challenges that are persistently noticeable. Since British readers and travellers were generally more interested in Scandinavian heritage and Nordic antiquity than in contemporary Denmark, there is comparatively little evidence for Duffy to work with; though his research is thorough, he necessarily returns repeatedly to the same figures, texts, and quotations, and in some cases to nearly the same interpretations. While this is partly unavoidable, the attendant repetitiveness might have been mitigated with more theoretical infrastructure, as this would allow the same quotations—say, the Horatio Nelson dispatch, which Duffy invokes six times (3, 40, 47, 89, 128, 136)—to be treated in a more varied fashion. In the same vein, a fuller justification and theorization of contemporaneity (or perhaps “modernity”) would have helped amplify the importance of Duffy’s project. While there is certainly a scholarly gap in accounts of Romanticism, it is unclear what is uniquely important or meaningful about Romantic-period interest in modernDenmark (in contradistinction to ancient traditions or origins), especially since, in many cases, this interest was evidently partly underpinned or driven by interest in the past. But British Romanticism and Denmark, in unpacking such sources so finely and tracing the sense of Northern identity so clearly, has undeniably helped to map out a new direction in accounts of Romantic nationalisms.

Andrew McKendry is Associate Professor of English Literature and Leader of the Humanities, Education & Culture Research Group at Nord University, Norway; he is the author of Disavowing Disability: Richard Baxter and the Conditions of Salvation (2021).

Families of the Heart: Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel by Ann Campbell

Bucknell University Press, 2022. 176pp. $28.95. ISBN 978-1684484232.

Review by Elizabeth Porter, Hostos Community College, The City University of New York, Bronx, New York, United States

Ann Campbell’s monograph offers a thorough and clear argument about the plot device of the surrogate family in the eighteenth-century British novel, focusing on works that feature female protagonists and are concerned with themes of courtship and marriage. The book’s argument is that surrogate families function as a plot convention to drive women’s experiences and inform their choices regarding courtship and marriage. Since women’s options for forming socially appropriate bonds were often limited to those in their household or in proximity to it, Campbell argues that the novel form is especially interested in exploring the ways in which protagonists locate and refine relationships with other characters who become surrogate relations. By devoting each chapter to a particular canonical novelist, Families of the Heart chronologically traces the figuration of surrogate families in works from Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson (two chapters), Eliza Haywood, and Frances Burney. The conclusion productively considers novels that also rely on the plot convention of surrogate families and address the theme of marriage, but that do not follow the exact criteria pertaining to Campbell’s argument.

The major contribution of this book is to complicate readings of novels with female protagonists that might overemphasize the role of courtship and marriage as the main driver of plot or the locus of emotion. Through choosing friends, bonding with servants, or locating people in or out of the household who become like family, women in novels push boundaries to enrich their lives. While not discounting the importance of courtship and marriage in these novels, Campbell carefully attends to the various threads of plotting along the road to marriage. Through close readings, Campbell brings into sharp focus the strands of relationality found in novels of the period.

The first chapter argues that in Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722)and Roxana (1724)surrogate families are preferred to nuclear and lineal families. The protagonists and their surrogate relations with other women offer entrepreneurial opportunities and are treated with emotional depth. Richardson scholars will be delighted by the thorough focus on his novelistic oeuvre in the next two chapters, with even the often-neglected Pamela sequel receiving consideration. Campbell considers how both Pamela novels (1740–41) experiment with the plot convention of surrogate family members by developing prototypes that are perfected in Richardson’s Clarissa (1748)and Sir Charles Grandison (1754). For instance, Pamela’s surrogate sisterhood with Polly in Pamela in Her Exalted Condition is a prototype for the surrogate sisterhood more compellingly illustrated in Clarissa between the protagonist and Anna Howe. Sometimes Campbell’s discussion of the bonds forged between women seems sexually charged, like when she writes that Clarissa and Anna Howe’s “lover-like clandestine correspondence is a spiritual elopement” (58). It would have been useful to address the queer possibilities in either her own argument or in existing scholarship, especially considering how same-sex desire between women has historically been misread as friendship or surrogate sisterhood.

In moving from a discussion of men writing women to women writing women, Campbell suggests that Haywood and Burney are more innovative than their male counterparts in using surrogate families to imagine learning opportunities and improved lives for young women. Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753)are examples of novels where choosing appropriate surrogate relations enable women to make better marital choices. Just as Haywood’s nonfiction (periodicals, essays, conduct books) advises women to exercise their capacity for reason in order to serve as better wives and mothers, her mid-century fiction dramatizes this process. Finally, in Burney’s first two novels, Evelina (1778)and Cecilia (1782), protagonists choose relationships with surrogate family members over biological family members, and these surrogate relationships tend to blur with marriage relationships. Evelina rejects her grandmother’s influence, choosing instead to follow the example of Mr Villars as well as her eventual husband, Lord Orville, who initially functions as a surrogate brother figure. Additionally, Cecilia compensates for herseemingly lacklustre marriage to Delvile by bonding with her mother-in-law, who serves as a surrogate mother figure before and after the marriage. While the readings of Haywood and Burney were compelling, I would have appreciated some further clarification on what to make of the claim that an ideal marriage in Evelina is modelled on a surrogate sibling relationship. While the whole point of surrogate families is that they are like family but not actually blood or lineal relatives, the borders sometimes become less distinct. Addressing the topic of sexual desire and the taboo of incest as it pertains to the argument would more effectively guide readers through this complicated web of relations.

Overall, the comprehensive summaries balanced with attentive close readings of these twelve novels offer an impressive and ambitious study of British novels in our period. Those who teach undergraduate and graduate-level courses in the eighteenth century will find this a helpful volume to consult and assign. While the influence of Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957)looms large—departing from recent perspectives in novel studies such as Stephanie Insley Hershinow’s Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel (2019) and Wendy Anne Lee’s Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel (2018), which helpfully question the value of perpetuating this origin story—Campbell’s study is valuable for calling attention to the overlooked plot devices within the larger framing of the conventional marriage plot. Attention to these devices allows us to consider how authors imagine women navigating and resisting their own limited purviews. By extension, authors narratively enact their own strategies for making their mark within the lines of convention. Such a detailed and precise study of so many canonical eighteenth-century novels offers a useful framework for scholars of eighteenth-century Britain to parse the complex web of relations informing narratives of the period.

Elizabeth Porter is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Hostos Community College, The City University of New York. She has published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Digital Defoe, ABO, and Pedagogy.

Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730 by Wolfram Schmidgen

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 288pp. $59.95. ISBN 978-0812253290.

Review by Emma Major, University of York, England, United Kingdom

Wolfram Schmidgen’s monograph is an impassioned, eloquent, and fascinating exploration of creation and being in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Refuting the still-dominant narrative of secularization, Schmidgen uses a series of case studies to demonstrate the importance of religion (and its corollary, anti-atheism) to debates about science, philosophy, and literature. He argues persuasively that “the aesthetic of infinite variety” of this period “cannot be fully appreciated without understanding that its expansionist program is linked to the battle against atheist necessity” (28).

Schmidgen is inspired by Arthur Lovejoy rather than Quentin Skinner in his interest in the potential of ideas unfettered by their history (11). Schmidgen points to the inescapable condition of all our work, that we are engaging with the past from our present; he explains, “What Infinite Variety argues about literary invention in early eighteenth-century England is true not because it shows what went on at that time” (23). The particular matrix of literature, philosophy, and theology produces a wealth of insights at a local level, but the three disciplines do pull in different ways, and it is partly because Schmidgen is so compelling in his arguments that it is disappointing to find gaps opening between the different strands. At some points, he writes as a scholar steeped in the period, offering informed insights into Locke, while at others he draws back from the language of eighteenth-century debate to assert the impossibility of our understanding the texts in their own terms, invoking Hans Georg Gadamer and using modern-day questions to illuminate the past. These modes of scholarship can coexist, and Schmidgen proves generally adept in both, yet in this book they appear often to have become unhappily entangled.

Central to the thesis in Infinite Variety is the concept of voluntarism, which I was initially puzzled to see being used as an organizing principle for authors who never used the word themselves. At times, the concept of voluntarism is illuminating, and the word “voluntarism” can certainly operate as a useful shorthand for the belief in God that is a counterpoint to the Neoplatonism of thinkers such as Shaftesbury, who fit more neatly into the currently dominant secularizing narratives. However, voluntarism was not defined as “voluntarism” in the historical period covered here, 1688–1730. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first recorded example as 1841 in Britain (for “voluntarist”) and 1838 in the US (“voluntarism”). That the theological and philosophical language used by the writers differs from that used by the critic discussing them does matter. Schmidgen is drawing on three disciplines in his work, and terms are of course used retrospectively in philosophy, where focus is on the concept rather than its historical semantics. But when a critical text is presented simultaneously as a contribution to the history of invention (10), and as a thought experiment that brings together present and past (23, and throughout), it is important to be clear about what is and is not historical. The handling of the eighteenth-century theological world is uneven, with moments of insight unnervingly accompanied by reductive comments about the Church of England and, very strangely despite a chapter on Daniel Defoe, the lively Dissenting culture that was so important to the literary, philosophical, and theological worlds of eighteenth-century Britain is almost entirely neglected. The battle-lines drawn were not simply between the Church and atheists, but also between Dissenting Protestantism and atheism, and the Church of England and Dissent; the non-juring bishops of 1687 were the result of a Glorious Revolution that fragmented as well as united the Church during this period. (Isobel Rivers’s scholarship on the period merits more than a single footnote.)

Those of us who do interdisciplinary work have a particular responsibility for intellectual clarity when we bring together different disciplines to appreciate more fully the extraordinary richness and possibility of eighteenth-century debate. From the back cover blurb onwards, voluntarism is presented as a coherent theology available to the writers of the period, to which we are told they were “drawn,” and the fact that it was not available to them in the form elaborated throughout this book is never addressed. It is also a paradox unacknowledged by the author that a work celebrating “disorder” in its title, and which is energized throughout by an engaging appreciation of the liveliness of the period, should need to turn to a nineteenth-century concept to tidy up earlier intellectual debate.

Schmidgen concludes with a rallying call to readers to engage with the “blind spot” of the secularizing narrative (212), but interdisciplinarity has its own difficulties, one of which might be an elision of intellectual traditions that results in an implicit claim for the historical existence of a later philosophical term. A continuing lapse, too, is the exclusion of women from debates in which they certainly took part historically. (Later female philosophers are rarely mentioned.) Despite introductory gestures toward the relevance of the arguments to gender and disability, the “infinite variety” here is firmly within patriarchal bounds. For this reader, at least, these are serious flaws. Yet, despite my cavils, this is a thought-provoking, valuable contribution to scholarship. Infinite Variety is very good, but only in parts: a curate’s egg of a book, perhaps.

Emma Major is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York, UK.

English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660–1800, ed. Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie

University of Delaware Press, 2022. 298pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-1644532607.

Review by Angelina Del Balzo, Bilkent University, Ankara, Türkiye

I am tempted to begin this review with an anecdote, a tried-and-true way of presenting an academic argument with a compelling narrative beginning. This is especially true for theatre scholars working in periods before the advent of visual and audio recording, where anecdotes are one of the only ways to access the experience of audience members and reviewers during long-past performances. Editors Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie’s new collection seeks to both theorize theatrical anecdotes in general and explore their place in eighteenth-century British studies in particular. While the use of anecdote is not unique to theatre scholarship, Ladd and Ritchie eloquently describe how anecdotes about live performance “erupt like sharp rocks in a stream, reinforcing the immediacy and singularity of the theatrical event” (7). The ephemerality of performance is paradoxically reinforced by the printed form of written anecdote, which in turn gains its authority from its origins in orality (4). Some contributors to English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1600–1800 employ eighteenth-century anecdotes to theorize about the generic form itself, while others explore what work anecdotes perform in specific theatre histories. The tensions between oral performance and print culture, fact and fictionality recur across the essays, offering a compelling argument for the importance of theatrical anecdotes to larger conversations across eighteenth-century literary studies.

This collection comes from the University of Delaware Press series Performing Celebrity, and many stories shared across the volume about the period’s most famous actor, David Garrick, make an argument for the unique work that anecdote does in the making of celebrity culture. In the coda, Ladd and Ritchie trace this culture from the eighteenth century to the present moment, from Matthew McConaughey’s (in)famous arrest for nude bongo-playing as a case study to current storytelling forms that dominate the social media platform TikTok. English Theatrical Anecdotes brings attention to analyzing specific important anecdotes and offers critical takes on what the work of anecdote does in theatre history, where extradiegetic narratives about performers overlap and affect the stories being played out on stage. A famous example is the perhaps apocryphal story of a violent altercation between Elizabeth Barry and Elizabeth Boutell over a costume veil during a seventeenth-century production of The Rival Queens, a staging of a “private disagreement in the midst of a public performance” that undermines these actors’ “status as professional performers” (54). Anecdotes are shown to preserve long-lost contemporary narratives around performers and to create stories after the fact, illuminating how people like Barry continued to have cultural currency decades or centuries after leaving the stage.

The brevity of the anecdote is central to the form, and many contributors look to what anecdotes remove or obscure in larger cultural narratives. For example, Ritchie’s essay looks at the oft-repeated anecdote of Garrick’s “killing” of his predecessor Dennis Delane’s career through merciless mimicry of Delane’s acting tics. Ritchie argues, however, that this anecdote serves to perpetuate the dominant cultural narrative of “Garrick’s instant originality and stardom by obscuring the extent of Garrick’s imitations of Delane” (30). Taking anecdotes more seriously as subjects of study can also reveal nuances missing from current scholarly narratives. Ladd analyzes the myriad anecdotes about Garrick’s colourful theatrical rival Samuel Foote that contribute to his persona as a “gentleman-clown” (62), showing the undercurrent of classism that runs through Foote’s humour, ultimately working to reinforce the status quo.

These essays should appeal to scholars whose interests lie beyond theatre culture due to the collections’ argument for the anecdotes’ importance to debates about fictionality. Amanda Weldy Boyd shows the overlap between theatrical anecdote and eighteenth-century life-writing, a genre that has long been shown as crucial to the creation of the modern subject. Anecdotes’ basis in fact has often been de-emphasized in favour of how anecdotes can, in Elaine McGirr’s words, “[harness] fictionality in order to achieve authenticity” (187), a framing that is familiar to theorizations of the realist novel. McGirr’s essay shows how a provably false anecdote that Mary Ann Yates became an actor while watching Susannah Cibber perform as Juliet works as a moment of self-fashioning. This invented narrative creates a lineage of female influence without competition for an actor whose success is often attributed to powerful theatrical men like Garrick and Thomas Sheridan.

McGirr’s point about fictionality serves a broader point about gender and career “authorship,” and this thread appears in many of the contributions. A major strength of the collection is how it highlights the ways that anecdotes are gendered. The scrutiny faced by public women is examined in different ways by many of the authors, where anecdote often serves the “social policing of women’s bodies” (100), as Nevena Martinović argues for anecdotes about the aging and ailing actor Sophia Baddeley. Martinović, Chelsea Phillips, Seth Wilson, and Danielle Bobker all engage with how anecdotes were a means of warning against or punishing women’s sexual transgressions, real or perceived. By contrast, Michael Burden, McGirr, and Fiona Ritchie demonstrate how certain anecdotes can serve as a way of bolstering claims for public women’s moral or artistic worth, whether it is Kitty Clive’s unjust exclusion from burial with other theatrical luminaries in Westminster Abbey or Elizabeth Farren’s elevation to Countess of Derby as a reward for maintaining her virtue along with her acting success.

Apropos of the idiosyncratic nature of anecdotes, the editors do not shy away from allowing writers’ personal voices to shine through the rigorous academic prose (Ladd certainly takes advantage of all the puns afforded by Foote’s name). I especially enjoyed how each of the contributor biographies included an anecdote of their own. In addition to being fun and revealing, it offers a metacommentary on the topic of the collection and each author’s approach to their own topic. Máire MacNeill’s essay on violence in anecdotes, for example, takes on additional resonance after learning about her previous experience fencing.

The coda directs readers to important areas for future research. Race is an underexplored realm of anecdote, both in the collection and in other works in the genre. Recovery work about Black artists such as Ignatius Sancho, Joseph Bologne, and Ira Aldridge has been enabled by repeated anecdotes, which preserve stories forgotten by mainstream history writing. Refreshingly, Ladd and Ritchie also specifically name the need for considerations of fatphobia in anecdote, a topic that remains under-considered even in scholarship interested in the intersections of oppression. The edited collection as an academic genre is often best when it captures a conversation in media res, and English Theatrical Anecdotes compellingly argues for the significance for current research on the form for eighteenth-century studies at large, and for the crucial role that scholarship on anecdote can serve conversations on genre, narrative, and identity going forward.

Angelina Del Balzo is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bilkent University in Ankara, Türkiye.

The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism by Corrinne Harol

Cambridge University Press, 2022. 252pp. $114.95. ISBN 978-1009273480.

Review by Philip Connell, University of Cambridge, England, United Kingdom

At first glance, there appear to be two striking anachronisms in the title of Corrinne Harol’s new book. The idea of the “postsecular” has been deployed in a wide range of contexts in recent years, but one could be forgiven for doubting the purchase it might have on the later Stuart period. We do not need to endorse the more thoroughgoing historiographical identification of England in this period as a “confessional state” to acknowledge that, on most accounts, the sociological concept of secularization finds at best uneven application to an early modern society still dominated by religious identities and, indeed, deep religious conflict. In this case, pursuit of the “postsecular Restoration” might seem still more premature. “Conservatism,” likewise, is usually thought of as an attitude or ideology constituted in response to the revolutionary struggles of the later eighteenth century. Although there are obvious ways in which the Restoration could be characterized as a society in profound reaction to the civil wars and interregnum, the nature of that reaction might more readily (and more conventionally) invite description under the rubrics of “royalism,” “toryism,” or even “neo-classicism.” The avoidance of such familiar terms is deliberate. Harol notes that the modern literary academy tends to be uncomfortable with the idea that the creative imagination might have an affinity with political illiberalism—that, in William Hazlitt’s words, “poetry is right-royal” (Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 1817). Nevertheless, an earlier generation of twentieth-century critics seem often to have assumed that the dominant literary culture of the so-called Augustan age was indeed essentially “conservative” in its identification with classical tradition, religious conformity, and social hierarchy. This has struck many subsequent scholars as an assumption worth arguing with.

But Harol is certainly not interested in attempting to revive an outdated critical habitus. Nor is she unaware of the provocation implied by her title and the need to ground her arguments in a historically sensitive treatment of their leading terms. Some of the best parts of The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism involve searching reconstruction of the complex contemporary meanings of what she calls (after Raymond Williams) “keywords.” The treatments of “passive obedience” and “faith” are exemplary of this kind of approach and serve not only as stimulating short essays in their own right but also as valuable contexts for Harol’s subsequent readings of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651)and Aphra Behn’s Love Letters (1684–87)and Oroonoko (1688). How, then, can this latter approach to Restoration culture accommodate “postsecular conservatism” as a meaningful element of historical analysis? Harol provides a number of answers to this question. To begin with, “the secular” is typically treated as incipient, emergent, or otherwise in potentia. In this sense, latitudinarian clergymen, John Locke, and “whigs” more generally can all be understood as harbingers of secularization. Some readers will be given pause by such claims, but they provide an effective foil for Harol’s treatment of Hobbes, Behn, Dryden, and Cavendish—writers who, it will at least generally be agreed, could not easily be mistaken for representatives of secular “whig” modernity. Their intimations of that modernity (however prescient) and their resistance to it are, in fact, precisely what unites these authors, energizing, on Harol’s account, a series of formal and generic literary innovations. The confessional allegiances of this group of authors do not admit of any easy collective identity, but they may all be understood as “postsecular” in this antagonistic—or perhaps rather dialectical—sense. The postsecular does not, for these purposes, need to postdate the process of secularization. The two are closely bound up with one another, as Harol attempts to show through a series of fine-grained interpretative case studies.

The most successful of these chapters, such as the treatment of Behn’s Oroonoko, relate the political and religious history of the period to particular representational forms (Behn’s “baroque realism”) thereby complicating the ways in which we might map ideological categories such as passive obedience onto the fiction’s plotting and characterization. The luxuriant intricacies of Harol’s readings evade, for the most part, their own implication in the baroque mode and typically work to underpin a larger series of claims concerning the relationship between secularization and the emergence of recognizably “modern” conventions of literary representation (exemplified above all in the novel). There is also a striking ambition in the range of material treated here. This latter characteristic is most evident in the book’s approach to historical periodization. The “long Restoration” extends, on Harol’s account, from Hobbes’s Leviathan to Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814). This claim only really makes sense once the reader realizes that “Restoration” is being used both as an ideologically neutral chronological marker and as a shorthand for a world that was lost in or around 1688, and which Harol’s literary conservatives were intent on salvaging in some imaginative form (quite literally, in the case of Cavendish’s fictional world-making). From this latter perspective, the book’s argument might legitimately encompass the affective and ideological registers of Jacobitism and licenses some brief but suggestive concluding reflections on Edward Waverley’s nostalgic “romance” of Stuart loyalty.

Philip Connell is Professor of Literature and History at the University of Cambridge.

Croire aux vampires au siècle des Lumières. Entre savoir et fiction par Stella Louis

Classiques Garnier, 2022. 268p. €32. ISBN 978-2406118978.

Critique littéraire par Emmanuelle Sempère (UR-1337), Université de Strasbourg, France

La question que se pose Stella Louis dans cet ouvrage n’est pas tant celle de la croyance aux vampires que celle de son écriture. Elle aborde le vampirisme en tant que « fiction » faite de mots et de discours, qui s’est constituée en mythe au travers des prismes des peurs, des superstitions et des croyances auxquelles il a pu faire écho. Très documenté tout en restant synthétique, l’ouvrage montre bien comment, à partir des documents fondateurs de la « fiction » du vampire (première partie), l’« imaginaire » vampirique s’est construit (seconde partie) puis comment « la postérité littéraire » a parachevé la « mythification » du vampire (troisième et dernière partie).

Le fond documentaire et les interprétations développées par cet ouvrage sont d’un très grand intérêt, mais nous dirons d’emblée, avant d’y revenir plus bas, que le nombre de fautes de langue est anormalement élevé pour une publication, de quelque nature qu’elle soit.

Sur le fond, on apprécie la clarté du développement concernant la diffusion et la transformation des témoignages issus de l’univers des superstitions et des peurs populaires, puis des rumeurs et des « discours » savants qui les ont interprétés et commentés. L’autrice circule avec aisance dans des sources diverses, de langues et de contextes différents (de l’Empire austro-hongrois au Royaume-Uni, en passant par l’Allemagne, la France et l’Italie), mobilise une documentation riche et variée, aussi bien dans le champ historique que littéraire, et puise ses références aussi bien dans le champ des croyances religieuses ou des superstitions populaires que dans les savoirs physiques et naturalistes, et remplit ainsi parfaitement l’objectif scientifique qu’elle s’est fixé. Passionnant est le travail sur le lexique du vampire au sein des langues et des régions qui en ont développé et transmis la croyance, de même que l’analyse suivie du « cas zéro » des histoires de vampires—un mort du nom d’Arnold Paole qui vers 1731 aurait molesté des morts du village serbe de Medwegya: né d’une peur collective, d’une rumeur qui s’est diffusée oralement, de témoignages qui ont circulé, le vampire Arnold Paole fit ensuite l’objet d’enquêtes officielles, de descriptions cliniques, de récits relayés par la presse et la littérature.

Dans le champ des savoirs liés au vampirisme, Louis montre que si les naturalistes qui se sont intéressés au vampire, le botaniste Tournefort (63), Buffon ou encore Linné, ont voulu procéder à « une investigation scientifique », leur approche révèle « la frontière mince entre savoir et fiction et peut-être un désir de fiction inconscient » (66). Le vampire entre, au sein même des discours savants, « dans un processus de “devenir-fiction” fantasmagorique » (69). Quant au « discours des religieux » sur le vampire, sa complexité s’explique par la spécificité des points de vue orthodoxe, catholique et protestant qui ont donné lieu aux prises de position et décisions officielles envers le vampire. Parmi les théologiens chrétiens qui ont traité du vampire le cas d’Augustin Calmet est exceptionnel et il fait à juste titre l’objet d’une étude très précise, mais replacée dans une perspective plus large que la seule querelle bien connue avec Voltaire. Stella Louis s’arrête par exemple aussi sur le cas des vestiges d’un « rituel de défense contre le retour des morts » exhumés par les fouilles archéologiques entreprises au début du XXI^e siècle dans la région de Venise (70sq.) et étudie également la manière dont le discours « philosophique » sur le vampire s’est nourri de son « interprétation médicale », et réciproquement (Michaël Ranft, 82–88, puis Rousseau, 89–99).

Les pages consacrées au « discours anthropologique » sur le vampire sont probablement parmi les plus originales, mais pas toujours les plus convaincantes, de cet ouvrage: Louis présente le vampirisme sous l’angle d’« une histoire de la rencontre entre société primitive et société civilisée » (149). Quoique le positionnement de l’autrice ne soit pas toujours suffisamment distancié, son analyse du point de vue de Lévy-Bruhl éclaire bien le développement de la fiction vampirique au début du XX^e siècle et plus généralement le processus de l’écriture vampirique: Lévy-Bruhl, au même titre que Ranft en quelque sorte, « particip[e] non seulement d’une diffusion de la croyance dans l’esprit de [son] lecteur mais aussi de sa circulation et de son influence fictionnelle » (154). Quant à la nature superstitieuse du vampire, il s’agit, explique Stella Louis, « du sens le plus extrême, le plus violent de la superstition qui dégage le drame d’une sacralisation de ce qui ne devrait pas l’être » (154). Dans ces pages, Louis reprend la thématique du discours de « masse » qu’elle a développée dans la première partie pour étudier la dimension collective du vampirisme, né au sein d’une culture « obnubilée par la mort et les morts qui la représentent » (156).

La méthodologie pluraliste adoptée dans cet ouvrage s’avère particulièrement pertinente pour étudier un phénomène culturel comme le vampire, né dans les eaux mouvantes des savoirs et des croyances et nourri par retour de l’imagination littéraire qu’il a suscitée: si le vampire est une fiction en lui-même, c’est bien « la fiction », littéraire cette fois, qui lui « permet […] de s’épanouir et de se réaliser » (214).

Mais nous l’avons dit, si le fond de l’ouvrage emporte à bien des égards l’adhésion, l’abondance des fautes de langue et des scories syntaxiques ou lexicales en rend la lecture par endroits pénible. Entre autres problèmes nous pointerons l’emploi du subjonctif après la conjonction « après que » (31, 183), et de l’indicatif après « bien que » (177) ou après l’alternative « soit que » (130); les fautes de conjugaison (au présent: *il conclue [116]; au passé simple: *il se rendît [31], *il vécu [61, etc.]); la confusion entre « ce » et « se » (30) ou les fautes d’orthographe courante (*en suspend [131]) ; les confusions lexicales (entre « savants » et « scientifiques » [184], ou, même page, l’emploi d’« intriguant » pour « irriguant »). Des phrases incompréhensibles du fait de coquilles ou de défauts syntaxiques entachent plusieurs passages clés du livre (aux pages 158 en fin de Seconde Partie, au bas de la page 164, etc.). Ces fautes formelles sont d’autant regrettables que Louis a de belles formules, très justes, comme celle-ci : « le vampirisme est une histoire de seuils, au sens littéral comme au sens figuré et métaphorique » (167) et que les analyses littéraires de la dernière partie sont fort intéressantes, en particulier, nous a-t-il semblé, celle de La Fiancée de Corinthe de Goethe aux pages 194–204.

L’ouvrage ici présenté mériterait donc à notre sens une réédition révisée qui rendrait mieux justice au travail remarquable de Stella Louis, et à tout le moins nous ne saurions trop conseiller à l’autrice de soumettre le manuscrit de son prochain ouvrage, annoncé p. 231, à l’expertise d’un relecteur professionnel si l’éditeur sollicité n’assure pas lui-même ce travail sur le texte.

Emmanuelle Sempère est Professeure de Littérature française du XVIII^e siècle, Université de Strasbourg.

Des femmes: Observations du préjugé commun sur la différence des sexes by Louise Dupin, ed. Frédéric Marty

Classiques Garnier, 2022. 546pp. €45. ISBN 978-2406131830.

Review by Angela Hunter, University of Arkansas-Little Rock, Arkansas, United States

French saloniste Louise Dupin (1706–99) is an overlooked thinker primarily due to the inaccessibility of her work to date but also in part due to the way that the history of philosophy has long privileged male thinkers. Frédéric Marty’s first-ever edition of Dupin’s unpublished work on women is a major accomplishment in remedying this neglect, and it opens exciting paths for research in eighteenth-century studies. Marty’s edition is built on the painstaking labour of reassembling a text that is the most in-depth and wide-ranging feminist intervention of eighteenth-century France, and arguably the most important. Although in the existing literature Dupin’s work is frequently called Ouvrage sur les femmes owing to the lack of a finalized title and to the presence of this description (post-dating Dupin) on a manuscript cover, Marty uses Des Femmes. This succinct choice is fitting given the scope of Dupin’s project: she aims to explain how women became subjugated to men over time, slowly losing rights and authority, with all domains of knowledge participating in this degradation and with social customs making this state of affairs appear natural and original. In tandem, she argues that women are equal to men physically and intellectually, thus deserving full social, political, and legal equality. Des Femmes offers historical depth and breadth as well as philosophical rigour, covering science, history and religion, politics, law, education, and contemporary mores. The project was quite advanced when Dupin ceased working on it in the early 1750s, but it remained incomplete. Only small portions were published prior to this edition. Marty had to contend with a fragmented set of manuscripts housed in eleven repositories across three countries, with other pieces held in private collections and in some cases with only fragmented drafts or research notes to connect to the still missing chapters (ten out of forty-seven). This edition provides the scaffolding necessary to understand the state of the manuscripts and the uncertainties that scholars face with them, such as the order of some of the chapters (called articles) planned by Dupin and the shifts that seem to have occurred in its overall structure as she developed the work.

Des Femmes has four major sections. The Partie physique (the only section named by Dupin) deals with science and the body: anatomy and physiology, reproduction, theories of temperament, physical and mental strength, even botany. Throughout, Dupin highlights the errors of ancients and moderns caused by prejudice infiltrating the beliefs and language of thinkers. She harnesses sources to argue that women are neither physically nor intellectually inferior to men. Here the influence of the seventeenth-century thinker Poulain de la Barre is most explicit, but Dupin’s focused critiques—pages of analysis of Herman Boerhaave and John Freind, as one example—go well beyond the model Barre provided.

The second section (Partie historique) deals with history and religion. In the latter, Dupin takes on biblical interpretation, arguing ultimately that “après avoir bien lu et médité l’Évangile, et en suivant les principes de ceux qui en ont bien pris l’esprit, on n’y trouve aucun fondement de la dignité particulière des hommes, et on peut au contraire en inférer une égalité très parfaite” (144). The main religious history chapters trace the church’s removal of spiritual authority from women and the destruction of female religious orders’ self-determination. In the political history chapters, Dupin canvases “l’historique des différentes nations pour examiner si l’opinion de l’inégalité des hommes et des femmes est ancienne sur la terre et si elle est ou jamais été générale” (53), to which the response is a resounding no. Dupin finds that modern historians in particular obfuscate women’s authority and contributions, and she attempts to read histories and travel narratives differently to recover women’s contributions in antiquity, in France, and beyond (parts of the Americas, Africa, and south Asia, China, Japan, and more).

The central claim of the third section (Partie juridique) is that the usurpation of women’s rights is modern, which Dupin advances via detailed analysis of marriage law (especially willful misinterpretations of Roman law by French jurists), succession (so-called Salic Law), tutelage, inheritance law, and more. She also addresses punishments for adultery and rape. As Marty rightly notes, Dupin “envisage un projet de réforme global concernant les institutions, les contrats de mariage, le statut juridique de la femme, le droit pénal et civil” (25). The fourth section (Partie morale) turns to the domain of social life and moeurs to explore education and upbringing, vices attributed to women, the (sexist) style of various scholars, love and the marriage relationship, portrayals of women on stage, and attitudes displayed in intimate and social settings. Marty explains that Dupin calls for a reform of education and socialization in order to “changer les mentalités” (27).

As this overview suggests, Dupin and her primary secretary (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) completed massive amounts of research, plumbing sources from numerous fields. Marty makes this erudition visible via footnotes throughout Dupin’s text, a brief section of the volume introduction (27–34), and the accompanying “études complémentaires” at the end of the edition. The first four (of nine total) are focused on the Partie physique where further information is provided about her sources and interlocutors. Students new to the field will appreciate general descriptions of the scientific landscape, while scholars will find interesting leads: as one example, a connection between a remark on electricity in article 2 could be followed to a 1751 publication by Benjamin Franklin that was made known in France by the Dupin family connection Thomas-François Dalibard (424). The second étude proves that Dupin closely followed cutting-edge debates on reproduction and assesses her position in relation to the main currents. The ninth étude takes a different direction, comparing the views on education of the abbé de Saint-Pierre (Dupin’s mentor), Rousseau, and Dupin. Marty uses Dupin’s separate short treatise on education to draw comparisons between the three thinkers on several issues, such as group versus home-based education.

Readers familiar with the Dupin papers via the inventory prepared by Anicet Sénéchal—an inventory referenced by every major repository in its cataloging—will appreciate how Marty connects the organization of his edition to it throughout, especially with the missing and incomplete articles (“Jean-Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Mme Dupin, d’après des documents inédits, avec un inventaire des papiers Dupin dispersés en 1957 et 1958,” Annales de la société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no. 36 [1963–65]: 173–289). Scholars rely on Sénéchal’s testimony about what the missing articles might have been about. Marty provides an information page for each missing article, and for some he provides relevant draft material in the appendices. Article 14, presumed to be about Greek history, serves as an example. The connected first appendix is a piece called “Histoire des Grecs,” framed by Marty as a view of Dupin’s general ideas on the subject. Marty’s archival work takes us beyond the limitations of Sénéchal’s inventory, too, as with article 17, “Divers pays d’Europe.” Sénéchal describes this article as simply a “suite discontinue de notes et d’observations” (239), perhaps describing the large collection of preparatory notes on this topic. Marty provides a clean and seemingly complete article. It demonstrates how Dupin wove a vast amount of research on women rulers, regents, and leaders across multiple nations into a single chapter that highlights selected examples to showcase women’s prior and widespread right to succession and/or the ability to transmit rulership. She connects this material to a central critique of the history section (that historians have systematically downplayed women’s authority and accomplishments). Of Naples and Sicily, she notes: “S’il n’y avait pas deux styles pour écrire l’histoire des princesses et celle des princes, les événements seraient transmis avec plus de fidélité” (209).

In a history chapter that Marty brings to the public for the first time (from a private collection), “De la Grande Tartarie, de la Chine et du Japon” (article 19), Dupin criticizes Père Jean-Baptiste Du Halde directly for translating the titles of several powerful Tartar women as “comtesse,” which she doesn’t believe matches their level of authority based on his evidence and for stating that Chinese women were not involved in studious activities even though some of his own examples contradict this (222, 224). Étude 6 provides related material. There Marty notes that, although the article is comparatively short, it relies on abundant research, and he describes some of the sources for which Rousseau created notes for Dupin, including several citations he copied. Marty ultimately traces the way that both Rousseau and Dupin reacted to this source material, offering a rare glimpse of Rousseau highlighting an attitude by noting that a citation represented “préjugées ordinaires sur les femmes” (445), while Dupin shows scepticism toward the objectivity of historians, translators, and missionaries (whose first-hand accounts were often the basis of historical sources) given their own biases against women.

The fifth appendix is a draw for scholars interested in the period topics of the state of nature and early society, as Marty includes portions of draft pieces perhaps connected to the missing article 25, “De l’origine du gouvernement.” One called “Observations critiques” argues that equality and community were central to the state of nature (contra Thomas Hobbes, briefly addressed) and that women participated in all leadership and labour tasks of early societies. Marty also includes a snippet of a much longer text, “Du rôle des femmes dans la guerre,” which he located via an auction house website (where only a few manuscript folios are visible). Because fragments of Dupin’s manuscripts continue to surface, the inclusion of this type of material is a boon for those eager to fill in more of Dupin’s thinking, no matter how small the publicly available portions may be.

Des Femmes confronts the effects of sexist bias, revises philosophical and historical narratives, argues for women’s full equality, makes a novel claim about the usurpation of their rights, and scrutinizes both everyday social interactions and textual examples (Fénelon, Vauvenargues, and Pope are a few of the authors addressed in section 4). Dupin writes in a highly engaging tone, sometimes polemical, sometimes personal, and the text is peppered with mordant irony throughout. Marty’s excellent edition provides crucial contextual and critical support for readers in their encounter with this significant feminist work.

Angela Hunter is a Professor of English at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and the co-editor/co-translator of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections (2023).

Reading with Austen, an online resource produced by The Burney Centre, Montreal, Canada, www.readingwithausten.com

Review by Sarah Raff, Pomona College, Claremont, California, United States

Edward Austen Knight was the third eldest brother of Jane Austen. As a boy, he attracted the favour of childless relations Thomas and Catherine Knight, whose property he inherited. It was he who supplied his mother and sister the cottage in Chawton where they lived from 1809; he also hosted their visits to Godmersham Park, the estate where he raised his eleven children and added to the 1,200-volume Knight family book collection. In the twentieth century, the Godmersham library, mentioned appreciatively several times in Jane Austen’s letters, was divided into smaller rooms, and many of the books were sold, but Edward’s great-great-great-grandson still owns over five hundred of the original volumes. An organization called the Godmersham Lost Sheep Society (GLOSS) is attempting to document and collect the remaining survivors. Reading with Austen, the product of many hands under the leadership of Peter Sabor of McGill University, draws on an 1818 catalogue of the Godmersham library to reconstruct the layout of the books on its shelves.

The website opens with a watercolour painting of one aspect of the library showing bookcases, two fireplaces, an abundance of chairs, and a woman seated at a desk. Click on the shelves and you are taken to the library’s south wall, where another click puts you in the “Left,” “Centre,” or “Right” section of the bookcase. Hover over a calf-bound spine and you see the title, author, date of publication, and catalogue number. Click on the spine and a window opens (regrettably obscuring, at least on my laptop, the location of the spine on the shelf) with further bibliographical information. In most windows, a link can take you to a full-text electronic copy of the book, which is usually publicly available. When Godmersham’s own volume is accessed, you can see and expand photos of the bookplate, opening pages, and pages that include marginalia. “Previous” and “Next” buttons allow you to click through windows from the leftmost side of the lowermost shelf through all the books of the south wall, after which you can explore the shelves on the east and west walls. (At the time of writing this review, the buttons were not functioning properly on the centre west wall.) The visual connection to the shelves makes it easy to orient yourself in the collection and enjoyable to spend time looking through the books.

Most of the books are English works of the long eighteenth century. You will also discover numerous volumes in French, a few in Italian and Latin, and a smattering in German, Spanish, and ancient Greek. “The range,” avers the website in a series of informative essays, “is typical of country-house collections of the time” (“History of the Library”). You will find “biographical, historical, geographical, theological and travel writings, as well as books about architecture and painting, science and medicine, farming, horsemanship, agriculture, gardening, landscape, and leisure pursuits, such as treatises on whist and chess.” Along with English novels, the library contains a novel in French by the libertine writer Crébillon fils, Goethe’s Werther in German, and Ovid’s love books (but only in Latin). The less risqué Metamorphoses appears in two English versions. The website includes a searchable catalogue.

The highlights of Reading with Austen are the photographs of hand-marked pages from the original collection. An 1875 thank-you note from Austen’s nephew Edward to a clergyman friend is inserted into a historical dictionary by William Lambarde; the bottom half of page 441 is mysteriously ripped out of Frances Burney’s novel The Wanderer; and several pages of handwritten theological analysis supplement Richard Hooker’s Works. On a sheet folded into Catherine Macaulay’s The History of England, some plodding reflections on historiography can renew your appreciation not just for the originality of Catherine Morland’s remarks about history in Northanger Abbey but also for the lack of pedantry in Henry Tilney’s response.

Many of the pencil marks in such volumes as Richard Steele’s The Ladies Library seem to be the work of a young person of teachable disposition on the lookout for moral lessons and sententious statements. Underlined in Marmontel’s Bélisaire are the non–earth-shattering reflections, “Hélas! Vous scavez que l’envie s’attache à la prospérité,” and “Il y a des maux inévitables” (13, 44). In Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, a marginal line emphasizes, “Beauteous her form, but beauty she despis’d, / Or beauty grac’d with virtue only priz’d” (29). In Charlotte Lennox’s translation of the Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune, Duke of Sully,a king’s underlined motive for granting his soldiers’ petition for rest, namely that “he followed that maxim, that a prince should always have the appearance of doing voluntarily even what he is constrained to do,” inspires the remark, “and other people too!” (book IV, 264). In the same work, a heavily underscored mention of a “long course of misfortunes” gets the marginal comment, “a good school!” (book VI, 350).

Sometimes the commentator becomes boisterously opinionated. An anecdote in the Memoirs about a smuggler who “defended himself with so much action” from the charge of carrying money that “the weight of the gold he had about him broke his pockets” inspires the scrawl, “So French” (book IV, 227). In The Life of Petrarch, someone has underlined the poet’s first glimpse of Laura “dressed in green, and her gown was embroidered with violets” (26). Penciled at the bottom of that page is the quick-relenting denunciation, “What an ugly dress!!! But it is not the dress that makes the woman!!!”

More subdued are the numerous corrections and additions of names of children and spouses, dates of marriages and deaths, and residences penned into The Peerage of England (1779) and The New Baronetage of England (1804). Persuasion’s Sir Walter Elliot, “improv[ing]” the Baronetage “for the information of himself and his family,” is fatuous and self-obsessed. Here, by contrast, the bid for accuracy seems admirable, an effort made for the benefit of posterity. The product of similar dedication, Reading with Austen will become a valuable online resource for anyone hoping to learn more about the author’s influences, allusions, and intellectual milieu.

Sarah Raff, author of Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice (2014), teaches at Pomona College and is at work on a book concerning guardians and wards in the English novel.

Ignatius Sancho’s London: Recovering Black Communities in the 18th Century (website), online resource via Northeastern University, https://dcrn.northeastern.edu/ignatius-sanchos-london/

Review by Taylor Schey, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States

Those researchers, historians, and critics interested in the life of Charles Ignatius Sancho have always had to contend in one way or another with the Joseph Jekyll biography that prefaces Sancho’s Letters (1782), despite the questionable validity of the biography. Scholars such as Brycchan Carey and Vincent Carretta have taken on some of its particulars and shown how they are likely fictionalized. Actor, playwright, and novelist Paterson Joseph has used its plot points as a basis for developing his own avowedly fictionalized version of Sancho’s life story in The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho: A Novel (2022), a portrait so rich in detail that the question of historical accuracy recedes to the edges of its frame. Still, the question lingers for Joseph himself, who, in his novel’s afterword, reflects on historiography and wonders what the future might hold for the Sancho family. What would their story look like if further discoveries about their lives were made?

One merit of the website Ignatius Sancho’s London: Recovering Black Communities in the 18^th Century, a project developed at Northeastern University under the leadership of Nicole N. Aljoe and Olly Ayers, is that it has made such discoveries. Another merit of at least equal value is that its online resource gathers and presents such an abundance of archival evidence, both new and old, that Jekyll’s account will no longer need to be the primary, go-to reference point for information on Sancho’s life, whether for scholarly work or for historical fiction. Ignatius Sancho’s London does directly engage that biography in a few places to correct the record: for example, one note explains that Sancho did not gamble away the yearly annuity he received from the Duchess of Montagu, as Jekyll claims in a passage in his biography that is saturated with anti-Black fantasies. Mostly, the website goes about the business of mapping Sancho’s personal history and social worlds to offer a newly vivid picture of eighteenth-century Black London and British social history more broadly.

I use the word “mapping”because the project takes the form of a social geography, consisting of an interactive map of Sancho’s London and a story map that narrates and illustrates his life. The latter resource is an authoritative, short biography that strikes notes of both humility and certainty, observing, for instance, that Sancho was “possibly born enslaved” and yet straightforwardly stating that his wife Anne was born in London without any mention of the common belief (derived, of course, from Jekyll) that she was originally from the West Indies. The website narrative also reveals some of the discoveries that the team made in the Boughton House archives, perhaps most notably that Sancho and Anne had eight children in total, rather than seven as was previously thought.

All the hard work that went into this remarkable research project is most fully on display in the interactive map of Sancho’s London, which, in addition to bringing his social worlds to life through six different layers of locations that one can filter on and off, also contains an astounding wealth of scrupulous detail. As a more or less random example: we learn that, based on the Westminster Historical Database recorded tax increase that Sancho paid on his property in 1774 as compared to 1780 as well as on John Thomas Smith’s recollection of a visit he and sculptor Joseph Nollekens had with Sancho shortly before his death, the building next to his shop at no. 19 was possibly the site of the Sancho family’s residence on Charles Street. The team notes twice that more archival evidence is needed to prove definitively this address of the family’s residence. At times, I found such extensive detail a bit overwhelming. When I clicked the first layer titled “Key Locations of Ignatius Sancho,” more than thirty starred locations appeared on the map, including such places as the site of a boat owned by the Montagu family that Sancho possibly used on the Thames. The different known places of his residence, his shop in Westminster, and maybe Drury Lane might have done well enough there, especially since the next layer that can be added is “Other Places Associated with the Sanchos.” But the trove of historical evidence that I quickly found at my fingertips was well worth the few minutes it took to become accustomed to using the map.

Perhaps the most salutary way that this map quietly counters Jekyll’s biography, and the anti-Black logics that subtend it, is through situating Sancho and his family within the broader Black networks of eighteenth-century London. Famously, the first words of that biography figure Sancho as an “extraordinary Negro,” not only prefiguring the insidiously double-edged idea of “Black excellence” but also reinforcing the notion that Sancho’s attributes and abilities were unexpectedly exceptional among people of African descent. Without flattening Sancho’s remarkable experiences and accomplishments, Ignatius Sancho’s Londondoes a superb job of illustrating the ordinariness of his life and his presence as a Black person in London in the eighteenth century. Toggle on the “Notable Black Londoners” filter and you will see familiar historical figures (Dido Elizabeth Belle, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Bill Richmond, and Robert Wedderburn, and others) emplotted within spatial and social networks rather than isolated as exotic synecdoches in a supposedly lily-white land. Next, toggle on the “Other Black London Locations” filter and you will start to see metonymic traces of Black British communities in places from which they have been erased in dominant histories. Making good on the promise of its subtitle, the project visually drives home that Black people were a commonplace part of London society in the eighteenth century.

Like other recent work on the period, Ignatius Sancho’s London offers a valuable new vantage on Black British life beyond slavery and abolition (to allude to the title of Ryan Hanley’s 2018 monograph). To its credit, it does not screen out the harsh reality of the slave trade or allow a visitor to lose sight of the violent pressure that the slave trade exerted on Black British communities. On the contrary, one of the final layers on the map of Sancho’s London—and the one showing by far the most locations—is of “Slaveholders and Beneficiaries” who reside or own property in London, the evidence for which is courtesy of the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. The hundreds of dots that immediately populate the map and swarm the locations of Black London serve as a reminder that, both then and now, beyond is always a fraught preposition when it takes racial slavery as its object. Thankfully, through its innovative formal means, Ignatius Sancho’s London ensures that this aspect of eighteenth-century Black life neither disappears entirely nor gets top billing. With a click of the mouse, one can consign the legacy of slavery to the margins and see everything else about Black life in London that has been there all along.

Taylor Schey is Assistant Teaching Professor of English at North Carolina State University and has articles published or forthcoming in venues such as Comparative Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, ELH, MLQ, Studies in Romanticism, and SubStance, among others.

My Life’s Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland by Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa, ed. and trans. Władysław Roczniak

Iter Press; distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2020. 305pp. $53.95. ISBN 978-1649590046.

Review by Elizabeth Zold, Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota, United States

Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa authored My Life’s Travels and Adventures around 1760, describing her travels in Turkey, Russia, and Poland between 1732 and 1760. Her adventures begin when she marries an older German physician, Jacob Halpir, and travels with him to Istanbul for his work. Such a description no doubt draws immediate parallels to Mary Wortley Montagu, whose own narrative of traveling to Turkey with her husband for his work as an ambassador was published in 1763. However, that is where the similarities between the two texts end. Whereas Montagu, like many women writers, was confined to upper-class rules of decorum when it came to descriptions in her travels and mentions of her personal life, Pilsztynowa’s writing is distinct and novel in its unfiltered observations about the world around her and unvarnished truths about her own life. My Life’s Travels and Adventures is written by a self-educated woman who worked hard to become a member of the middle class by learning to practice medicine from her first husband. A layered text that pulls from several genres including travel narrative and Old Polish Baroque memoir, the narrative details Pilsztynowa’s personal and family life alongside her anecdotes about medicine, travel, history, occultism, religious beliefs, and cultural customs. Pilsztynowa’s narrative and style provide a unique perspective and voice in eighteenth-century women’s writing, and its editor and translator, Władysław Roczniak, has made Pilsztynowa’s text accessible to more readers through its first ever complete English translation. With this critical edition, Roczniak has put forth an important, exciting contribution to eighteenth-century women’s life writing.

Roczniak provides scholars with resources to help them navigate and work with My Life’s Travels and Adventures. His opening critical essay weaves together threads to offer a rich context for Pilsztynowa’s text: Polish political and religious history, Pilsztynowa’s biography, a summary of the critical discussion of the text’s generic conventions and forms, the manuscript’s history, and an overview of the critical response to the text. As expected, there are guiding footnotes throughout the text that note historical context, translation clarifications, and corrections for textual inaccuracies from the author. In addition, there are three appendixes at the end of the book. The first is a comprehensive list of places mentioned in the narrative, including their contemporary and modern names. Roczniak also provides a glossary of the patients whom Pilsztynowa treats in the text with accompanying notes if a remedy is given for the ailment and if it succeeded. The final appendix is a chronology that maps events in Pilsztynowa’s memoir with the date, corresponding chapter in the text, and relevant historical background. As a result, Roczniak’s edition makes Pilsztynowa’s work accessible to a wide audience.

My Life’s Travels and Adventures is significant not just because it is one of the earliest examples of Polish women’s writing: Pilsztynowa is unique in her willingness to be vulnerable within the text. This vulnerability is even more striking given the fierceness with which she lived her life. As Roczniak argues, Pilsztynowa was a self-educated woman unconfined by “the boundaries between men and women, took to be immutable” (36). For example,Pilsztynowa spent her life living apart from her husband(s) in foreign countries, making a living as a physician and fiercely protecting herself: she proudly recounts flashing her two pistols at a Turkish cavalryman who threatens to kill her, stating “Do you believe that Polish women have hearts of rabbits, like your Bulgarian or Wallachian girls?” (154). Despite this bravado, she finds her heart repeatedly broken when she falls for the lies and manipulation of the third male partner in her life, whom she refers to as her “cavalier.” Of him, Pilsztynowa writes, “I was greatly vexed by him; after all he was a person of little means, never learned anything, never listened to me, and whenever he talked he lied. His single talent was his incredible patience. No matter how much I screamed at him, he patiently took it. So I always took care of him” (168). Pilsztynowa exposes intimate aspects of her complicated life to the world; these twenty eight years include multiple imprisonments, ransoms, and medical intercessions from God nestled next to historical and cultural anecdotes that are punctuated by shocking moments from her personal life, such as two failed marriages—including one to her former slave, an Austrian prisoner of war who tries to poison her—and a young son who dies of neglect and starvation at the hands of her cavalier. As a result, her memoir provides readers with a glimpse into her fascinating and singular life.

Roczniak’s strength as the editor is that he never tries to distill Pilsztynowa down into just one facet of her identity; he presents this complicated human in all her contradicting dimensions. With so many disparate elements within Pilsztynowa’s narrative, Roczniak notes in his introduction that many scholars and historians have difficulty pinning down Pilsztynowa’s ideologies. To some, she is a simple, uneducated woman, while others argue for her intelligence in advocating for women in the medical field; she could be “an empiricist practicing science, or a blind believer in black magic and the occult, an enlightened advocate of Christian-Muslim relations, or a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite. She could be an emancipated proto-feminist, or a capitalistic oppressor active in the slave trade and the disenfranchisement of others” (33). All of these things are true to some degree, as Roczniak states, “but never in their entirety,” which is what, he argues, makes Pilsztynowa’s memoir so important (33). I would add that the significance of this critical edition is that it presents Pilsztynowa’s narrative and all of its ideological complexities and contradictions without trying to reconcile them. The result is a valuable translation and critical edition of My Life’s Travels and Adventures that is sure to grab the attention of students and scholars studying eighteenth-century women’s writing.

Elizabeth Zold is a Professor of English at Winona State University and has published on eighteenth-century English women’s travel narratives.