Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by MaryWollstonecraft; Carol H. Poston; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by MaryWollstonecraft; Carol H. PostonReview by: Patricia Meyer SpacksThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Apr., 1979), pp. 422-423Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3727814 .

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Dickensian criticism that this field has not only been lightly examined or left to cranks, but we have frequently been warned off. The best approach may well be to enter it through a historical gate, as Mr Pickering does; for the pious have usually been affronted at Dickens's unorthodoxy, and the impious cannot even tell what he is writing about.

There remain a few reservations that partly arise from the pace with which the argument is put forward. It may be agreed that Little Nell is something of a stock heroine, closely related to Richmond's 'Young Cottager'. The case is rather weaker in maintaining that Barnaby Rudge is 'the most theologically revealing of Dickens' early novels'; and then, in being asked to see Dombey and Son as marking 'the twilight of systematic religion' in Dickens's fiction, one feels rushed. It might be argued that religion in his fiction is never entirely systematic; that it is just as evident, for example, in Oliver Twist and Bleak House; that Dickens's earliest work includes a mockery of Methodism; that he always rejected the doctrine of original sin; and that the breadth of his belief may have been marked by a much wider range of reading, including Henry Fielding and Leigh Hunt, whose anonymous Christianism had been paid for and published by John Forster. But it is welcome to find an insistence on the significance of Unitarianism, and the importance of morality to Dickens's first readers. Even now, once it is removed, new themes and points of view have to be found if the novels are to hold together. John Forster was right to be outraged at Taine's regret that Dickens could not be like Balzac, and 'leave morality out of account'.

Not for a long time have I read so short a book with so much in it.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH K. J. FIELDING

Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. By MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. Edited by CAROL H. POSTON. Lincoln, Nebraska and London: University of Nebraska Press. I976. xxiv + 200 pp. $11.50 (paperbound $4.95).

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. By MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. Edited by CAROL H. POSTON. (Norton Critical Editions) New York: Norton; Toronto: George J. McLeod. I976. x + 240 pp. $o.o00 (paperbound $2.95).

Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797. Almost two centuries later, a canonized feminist, subject of two biographies in the last few years, she has yet to receive the critical attention she deserves. These two attractive editions, clarifying and making accessible previously obscure texts, may facilitate a critical undertaking which they barely initiate.

'Without knowledge there can be no morality!', Wollstonecraft writes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 'Ignorance is a frail base for virtue !'. True to her century's hope that the mind might triumph over the forces of irrationality, she attacks the ignorance of women about their condition and its sources. Yet she knows the futility of the endeavour, aware that 'men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in'. The tension between the positions suggested by these statements, the necessities of knowledge, reason, and morality conflicting with those of social actuality, generates much of the Vindication's energy. Passionately rebellious against woman's social reduction to a creature afraid even of 'the frown of an old cow', passionately affirmative of female potentiality (why, she asks, should women not work as doctors, study politics, participate in business, instead of marrying in order to be sup- ported?), Wollstonecraft constructs a sometimes incoherent but always powerful

Dickensian criticism that this field has not only been lightly examined or left to cranks, but we have frequently been warned off. The best approach may well be to enter it through a historical gate, as Mr Pickering does; for the pious have usually been affronted at Dickens's unorthodoxy, and the impious cannot even tell what he is writing about.

There remain a few reservations that partly arise from the pace with which the argument is put forward. It may be agreed that Little Nell is something of a stock heroine, closely related to Richmond's 'Young Cottager'. The case is rather weaker in maintaining that Barnaby Rudge is 'the most theologically revealing of Dickens' early novels'; and then, in being asked to see Dombey and Son as marking 'the twilight of systematic religion' in Dickens's fiction, one feels rushed. It might be argued that religion in his fiction is never entirely systematic; that it is just as evident, for example, in Oliver Twist and Bleak House; that Dickens's earliest work includes a mockery of Methodism; that he always rejected the doctrine of original sin; and that the breadth of his belief may have been marked by a much wider range of reading, including Henry Fielding and Leigh Hunt, whose anonymous Christianism had been paid for and published by John Forster. But it is welcome to find an insistence on the significance of Unitarianism, and the importance of morality to Dickens's first readers. Even now, once it is removed, new themes and points of view have to be found if the novels are to hold together. John Forster was right to be outraged at Taine's regret that Dickens could not be like Balzac, and 'leave morality out of account'.

Not for a long time have I read so short a book with so much in it.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH K. J. FIELDING

Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. By MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. Edited by CAROL H. POSTON. Lincoln, Nebraska and London: University of Nebraska Press. I976. xxiv + 200 pp. $11.50 (paperbound $4.95).

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. By MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. Edited by CAROL H. POSTON. (Norton Critical Editions) New York: Norton; Toronto: George J. McLeod. I976. x + 240 pp. $o.o00 (paperbound $2.95).

Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797. Almost two centuries later, a canonized feminist, subject of two biographies in the last few years, she has yet to receive the critical attention she deserves. These two attractive editions, clarifying and making accessible previously obscure texts, may facilitate a critical undertaking which they barely initiate.

'Without knowledge there can be no morality!', Wollstonecraft writes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 'Ignorance is a frail base for virtue !'. True to her century's hope that the mind might triumph over the forces of irrationality, she attacks the ignorance of women about their condition and its sources. Yet she knows the futility of the endeavour, aware that 'men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in'. The tension between the positions suggested by these statements, the necessities of knowledge, reason, and morality conflicting with those of social actuality, generates much of the Vindication's energy. Passionately rebellious against woman's social reduction to a creature afraid even of 'the frown of an old cow', passionately affirmative of female potentiality (why, she asks, should women not work as doctors, study politics, participate in business, instead of marrying in order to be sup- ported?), Wollstonecraft constructs a sometimes incoherent but always powerful

Reviews Reviews 422 422

This content downloaded from 193.142.30.103 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 12:54:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Reviews 423

argument in favour of serious education for women (an important aspect being the education of boys and girls together), in opposition to a system which makes pleasing others the highest female function. Although her immediate target is the theorists of her own time (notably Rousseau, whose male arrogance fills her with rage, and James Fordyce, whose Sermons to Young Women include a recommendation to piety based on the observation that a woman never looks more beautiful than when 'composed into pious recollection'), her insights retain their sharpness and their relevance today.

The present edition, competently annotated (although with occasional lapses such as a surprising inability to identify a familiar quotation from Swift, and a misattribution of an allusion to Pope), includes also a chronology, a selected biblio- graphy (although no index), and a scattering of background and critical material. The background excerpts, suggesting the nature of conservative and radical eighteenth-century positions about women, are too fragmentary to shed much light on the issues, but they indicate lines of further investigation. The criticism, on the whole, seems depressingly inadequate - through no fault of the editor; she has little choice. At its best, it offers the elegances of Virginia Woolf or conveys the ground for respecting Wollstonecraft's political and moral views; at its worst, it embodies the extravagances of simple-minded psychoanalytic exegesis ('Mary Wollstonecraft hated men. She had every personal reason possible known to psychiatry for hating them'). No critic attempts to analyse the complexities of the writer's diction, to discover the sources of her linguistic power, or to indicate how delicately she poises between the ideas of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth centuries.

The Scandinavian Letters to Gilbert Imlay, first published in 1796 (four years after the Vindication), also demand complex critical response, as combining the con- ventional eighteenth-century traveller's record of foreign country and people with a series of personal, often deeply emotional, utterances. Once more Carol Poston supplies sound annotation and bibliography but no index; here she also includes a short introduction which calls attention to some of the intellectual and psycho- logical problems raised in the letters themselves: Wollstonecraft's ambivalent attitude towards death (she made two suicide attempts, one before, one after this trip); her devotion to her infant daughter by Imlay (the child accompanied her on her journey); and her sensitivity to the plight of women in various social conditions. 'What a long time it requires to know ourselves; and yet almost every one has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own, even to himself', Wollstonecraft observes. Her letters, more directly revealing than the Vindication, reflect an apparent progress in the self-knowledge generated by solitude and sadness. They confirm the impression that their author merits attention, as an exemplar of the intricate attitudes of her time, as a forceful spokeswoman for her sex, as a compelling thinker and an eloquent writer. PATRICIA MEYER SPA PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS WELLESLEY COLLEGE, WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS

Jane Austen's Achievement. Papers Delivered at the Jane Austen Bicentennial Con- ference at the University of Alberta. Edited by JULIET MCMASTER. London: Macmillan. I976. xviii + 139 pp. ?6.95.

Six papers are published in this welcome volume, which would, however, have been even more welcome had Lionel Trilling's paper, 'Why We Read Jane Austen', intended for delivery at the conference, been included. (Professor Trilling was then ill and unable to be at Alberta; after his death the paper, almost but not quite

Reviews 423

argument in favour of serious education for women (an important aspect being the education of boys and girls together), in opposition to a system which makes pleasing others the highest female function. Although her immediate target is the theorists of her own time (notably Rousseau, whose male arrogance fills her with rage, and James Fordyce, whose Sermons to Young Women include a recommendation to piety based on the observation that a woman never looks more beautiful than when 'composed into pious recollection'), her insights retain their sharpness and their relevance today.

The present edition, competently annotated (although with occasional lapses such as a surprising inability to identify a familiar quotation from Swift, and a misattribution of an allusion to Pope), includes also a chronology, a selected biblio- graphy (although no index), and a scattering of background and critical material. The background excerpts, suggesting the nature of conservative and radical eighteenth-century positions about women, are too fragmentary to shed much light on the issues, but they indicate lines of further investigation. The criticism, on the whole, seems depressingly inadequate - through no fault of the editor; she has little choice. At its best, it offers the elegances of Virginia Woolf or conveys the ground for respecting Wollstonecraft's political and moral views; at its worst, it embodies the extravagances of simple-minded psychoanalytic exegesis ('Mary Wollstonecraft hated men. She had every personal reason possible known to psychiatry for hating them'). No critic attempts to analyse the complexities of the writer's diction, to discover the sources of her linguistic power, or to indicate how delicately she poises between the ideas of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth centuries.

The Scandinavian Letters to Gilbert Imlay, first published in 1796 (four years after the Vindication), also demand complex critical response, as combining the con- ventional eighteenth-century traveller's record of foreign country and people with a series of personal, often deeply emotional, utterances. Once more Carol Poston supplies sound annotation and bibliography but no index; here she also includes a short introduction which calls attention to some of the intellectual and psycho- logical problems raised in the letters themselves: Wollstonecraft's ambivalent attitude towards death (she made two suicide attempts, one before, one after this trip); her devotion to her infant daughter by Imlay (the child accompanied her on her journey); and her sensitivity to the plight of women in various social conditions. 'What a long time it requires to know ourselves; and yet almost every one has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own, even to himself', Wollstonecraft observes. Her letters, more directly revealing than the Vindication, reflect an apparent progress in the self-knowledge generated by solitude and sadness. They confirm the impression that their author merits attention, as an exemplar of the intricate attitudes of her time, as a forceful spokeswoman for her sex, as a compelling thinker and an eloquent writer. PATRICIA MEYER SPA PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS WELLESLEY COLLEGE, WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS

Jane Austen's Achievement. Papers Delivered at the Jane Austen Bicentennial Con- ference at the University of Alberta. Edited by JULIET MCMASTER. London: Macmillan. I976. xviii + 139 pp. ?6.95.

Six papers are published in this welcome volume, which would, however, have been even more welcome had Lionel Trilling's paper, 'Why We Read Jane Austen', intended for delivery at the conference, been included. (Professor Trilling was then ill and unable to be at Alberta; after his death the paper, almost but not quite

This content downloaded from 193.142.30.103 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 12:54:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions