edition of Montesquieu’s Essai sur le goût (c. 1753-1755). Published posthumously inthe Encyclopédie, this exposition of Montesquieu’s views on aesthetics and artisticjudgement was the author’s only contribution to Diderot and D’Alembert’sencyclopaedia, and as such has attracted more attention from critics than some of theother lesser-known works in this volume. Becq’s edition of the Essai is particularlyworthy of note because she refutes the judgements of previous commentators, whohad dated the Essai to the late 1720s on the basis that the author’s Pensées from thisperiod mention the existence of an ‘ouvrage sur le goût’ (p.467). Becq claims insteadthat the work was composed expressly for the Encyclopédie in the mid-1750s (p.471).Her notes on the Essai reflect this judgement, and establish many interestingcomparisons between Montesquieu’s work and other writings on aesthetics producedin the second half of the eighteenth century. While the absence of a manuscriptsource for the Essai means that critical disputes as to its origins are likely to remainunresolved, its inclusion in this volume means that the work will be of interest toscholars of Enlightenment aesthetics, as well as to those studying French literatureand political philosophy.

Montesquieu emerges from this volume as a philosopher, encyclopédiste, poet,traveller, academician and a writer of fiction. One of the later texts in the volume, theMémoire sur le silence à imposer sur la Constitution (1754), which relates to the disputebetween the French Crown and the Parlements over the enforcement of the BullUnigenitus, shows that its author was also an écrivain engagé who sought to intervenein the political debates of his day. Montesquieu’s Œuvres et écrits divers thus succeed inrepresenting the whole range of the author’s intellectual activities, in both the privateand the public spheres.

Ursula Haskins GonthierUniversity of Birmingham

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. General Editor Janet Todd.Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Pat Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.2006. lxxx + 540 pp. £65 hb. 0-521-82514-8.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new scholarly edition of Pride andPrejudice has to be ‘an indispensable resource for all scholars and readers of Austen’.More than that, the jacket blurb goes on to assert that ‘The Cambridge Austen is thedefinitive edition for the twenty-first century.’ Such conventional publishers’ hype isparticularly poignant, perhaps, in the context of a novel that begins with a famousparody of the sweeping statement.

This edition of Pride and Prejudice can be seen from two angles: as a new ‘standardedition’ to replace R. W. Chapman’s (1932) in the Oxford Novels of Jane Austen, and asa text that bears comparison with other modern scholarly critical editions, such asthose in Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics. As a replacement for Chapman,the advantages of this new edition are obvious. Support for the modern reader isgreatly expanded. The inclusion of a Chronology by Deirdre Le Faye, of an extensiveIntroduction which includes a detailed account of the novel’s publishing history, andof lengthy Explanatory Notes all contribute towards an attempt ‘to place Austen’snovels in the context of her age’ (p.461), as do the Appendices on such topics as thelegal and military background and possible models for Pemberley.

Rogers’ Introduction, in keeping with the expectations and requirements of suchan edition, takes on the task (by no means easy) of providing as comprehensive an

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account as possible in a limited space of the novel’s inception, its immediate contextand its reception, from publication in 1813 to the present day. This he achieves on thewhole in both densely informative and entertaining style. In the section dealing withAusten’s reading, however, I found Rogers curiously anxious to deny any possibilitythat women writers from the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century could berelevant when thinking about Austen. He finds, quite reasonably, the ‘truly importantbasis for Austen’s art’ in ‘recent and contemporary fiction’, with Burney andEdgeworth thus figuring largely (p.xlv). But of earlier women novelists – ‘animportant tradition [...] including major figures such as Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywoodand Sarah Fielding’ (an odd grouping in itself) – he asserts: ‘This was a buried streamby 1800’ (p.xl).

If nothing else, this leads to further statements that are simply incorrect. ‘As forHaywood, none of her books was reprinted after the 1760s’, for example. Yet TheFemale Spectator was reprinted twice in the 1770s and both The History of Miss BetsyThoughtless and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy were reprinted in the 1780s.Betsy Thoughtless is proposed by both Jane Spencer and Janet Todd in, respectively, TheRise of the Woman Novelist and The Sign of Angellica, as a key text in the developmentof the ‘reformed heroine’ plot, one clearly (as they both point out) relevant to Austen.Rogers, however, concludes that ‘As a matter of historical record [...] Jane Austen wasprecluded from access to what could have provided a model in terms of femaleauthorship: old editions of Behn, Haywood and their like never figured in thecollections of Anglican clergyman or in the circulating libraries.’

Given how much we shall never know about the details of the contents of so manylibraries in the period this seems a somewhat risky use of the sweeping statement.Rogers himself points out that ‘We have no means of reconstructing the exactcontents of [Austen’s] father’s library.’ One Anglican clergyman at least had bothBehn and Haywood in his collection: the library of the Reverend Ellis Jones, sold inLondon in 1786, contained Haywood’s Fruitless Enquiry (1767) and a four-volumeedition of Behn’s plays (1724). A circulating library in Newcastle in the 1790s carrieda two-volume edition of Behn’s novels, while Palmer and Merrick’s in Oxford carrieda four-volume edition of Haywood’s early novels including Love in Excess, The BritishRecluse and Fantomima. The ‘late Reverend and learned George Costard’, the catalogueof whose library was published in 1782, had copies of Haywood’s Jemmy and JennyJessamy and The Invisible Spy. Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, indeed, appears in the work oftwo of Austen’s contemporary novelists – as an example of what not to read in More’sCoelebs in Search of a Wife (1808), and as an indication of poor taste in Scott’s OldMortality (1817), suggesting that it still retained some currency (if hardly flattering!)after 1800.

So the work of early women novelists continued to circulate to some degree up toand after 1800. But this is not an argument about whether Austen actually readHaywood or Behn, although it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility thatAusten might have had access to their work. The influence of early fiction by womenon Austen’s favourite Richardson alone hardly allows such fiction to have been‘buried’ without trace by 1800, even if the later editions, and access to earlier editionsvia libraries, had not existed.

The Notes to this edition of Pride and Prejudice are the most comprehensiveavailable, providing many valuable details to make the world of the novel morecomprehensible to the modern reader. While much of the same ground is covered inthe Penguin and World’s Classics editions, the Cambridge edition has significantly

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more entries, attempting to provide the fullest annotation possible without beingheavy-handed. The arrangement of the Chronology here bears comparison with thatin the World’s Classics edition. The World’s Classics Chronology has two columns sideby side, one for Austen’s life and another for historical and cultural background;Deirdre Le Faye’s Chronology only notes a few events of wider historical significance,chiefly relating to the war with France. Such an approach tends to minimise theextent to which we are encouraged to think of Austen in terms of the wider culturaland political life of her time, but this is in keeping with the tone of Rogers’Introduction which, while not believing that she ‘led a wholly sheltered life, obliviousto the ideological struggles that went on during her lifetime’ (p.xlii), does reject thesuggestion ‘that the novelist imbibed the radical ideas of the age more deeply thanconventional wisdom allows’ (p.xliv).

Although I have some reservations, this edition is a handsome volume with muchimportant material for both scholars and students. It will almost certainly become anindispensable resource, a standard text for reference in scholarly work. Other criticaleditions also have much to offer, however, and will continue to be profitably consulted.Whether we have already seen the production of the ‘definitive edition for the twenty-first century’ is probably, in 2007, rather too early to tell.

Gillian SkinnerSt Chad’s College, Durham University

Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters. W. A. Speck. New Haven, CT, and London:Yale University Press. 2006. 395 pp. £25 pb. 0-300-11681-0.

Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism. Edited by Lynda Pratt.Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2006. 298 pp. £55 hb. 978-0-7546-3046-3.

Southey on Nelson: The Life of Nelson by Robert Southey. Edited by RichardHolmes. London: Harper Perennial. 2004. 301 pp. £7.99 pb. 0-00-71170-3.

Robert Southey: Poetic Works 1793-1810. General editor Lynda Pratt: volumeeditors, Lynda Pratt (1, 2 and 5), Tim Fulford (3) and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (4).London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004. 2624 pp. £450 hb. 1-85196-7311.

My first encounter with a writer whom Byron termed ‘the only entire existing man ofletters’ came early when, as a student in the 1960s, I read Raymond Williams’ Cultureand Society 1780-1950. Williams, it will be recalled, cites Southey’s Colloquies of 1829

as a cogent example of anti-laissez faire conservatism of the early industrialperiod and discusses the unexpected relationship of Southey with Robert Owen.Without thinking about it too precisely, I then expected Southey to turn upsomewhere on the syllabus when I started teaching the Romantic period myself inthe early 1970s. I had underestimated the tenacity of the then Romantic poetrycanon (the ‘big six’ with Blake enlisted but Clare not yet fully admitted) and thenarrow discursive prose canon (consisting of Wordsworth’s Preface, BiographiaLiteraria, a few essays by Lamb and Hazlitt, and the poetic credos of Shelley andKeats). This situation of course would change radically over the next decades: thepoetic canon would expand to include Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, FeliciaHemans, LEL and other women writers. The radical novelists and polemicists of the

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