Review of Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot

The subtitle of Joanne Wilkes' elegant and meticulous monograph is somewhat misleading. Although Austen, Bronte and Eliot make regular appearances, as one would expect the three major female literary figures of the nineteenth century to do, the work does not seek to investigate their critical histories - something which Wilkes has already done in a compelling essay published in Joanne Shattock's collection Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (2001). Instead, Wilkes' attention here is firmly directed at the careers of the critics who, for the most part, remain on the margins of Victorian studies: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, and the better known Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward. Margaret Oliphant lambasted critics who grouped women writers simply on the basis of gender, and grumbled that 'the idea of starting with [Austen] for a criticism on George Eliot is the sublime of absurdity' (p. 127). Perhaps with this warning in mind, Wilkes makes painstaking differentiations between her subjects, who are discussed individually. An appealing consequence of this approach is its ability to display the sheer diversity of nineteenth-century women's writing. For Maria Jane Jewsbury, anonymous reviewing was 'an opportunity to reconcile her desire to publish with her reservations about seeking fame' (p. 43); the more discreet Sara Coleridge's 'constant lauding of the "feminine" in women's lives and writing was in part a way of reassuring herself and others that . she was still herself "thoroughly feminine'" (p. 55). The historians Lawrance, Williams, and Kavanagh also found that their perceptions of themselves and of their female subjects overlapped. Lawrance felt that women could take on qualities traditionally associated with masculinity, 'such as intellectual powers and political acumen' (p. 83); Kavanagh repeatedly argued that women were to be thanked for introducing into fiction the 'exploration of the inner psychological life' (p. 78), and ...