Although they constitute a substantial portion of her writing, the reviews Mary Wollstonecraft wrote for Joseph Johnson’s progressive journal, the Analytical Review (launched in 1788), rarely receive sustained critical attention. This omission is unfortunate, for these reviews collectively testify to the breadth of Wollstonecraft’s reading and to the extent of her activity within the literary marketplace of her time. As such they are a valuable resource for and index to her opinions during perhaps the most decisive and yet also the most neglected period of her career. But just as importantly, the reviews deserve close attention because they show us how Wollstonecraft developed her own distinctive voice as a feminist cultural critic by engaging with the texts under review. The reviewing experience thus simultaneously educated the private, anonymous writer and her reading audience. As Wollstonecraft learns and teaches, she also moves from tentative confessional author to the authoritative public figure who altered the social, political, and literary sphere during the transitional period of the 1790s.
Wollstonecraft served her literary apprenticeship as a reviewer for the Analytical Review and worked again as a journalist in her latter years when she was on the verge of artistic maturity. Interestingly, then, her reviews of poetry and popular romance cluster around the periods when she was herself most intensely involved in creative activity.1 Her early contributions laid the groundwork for her later achievements – showing affinities with the themes and language of the Rights of Woman, to take only one example. Clearly, her immersion in contemporary literature helped her to formulate her own special feminist stance, that peculiarly Wollstonecraftian blend of rational radicalism and precocious romanticism.
Before I turn to the place Wollstonecraft’s reviews occupy in her career as a whole, it is important to address the problem of attribution. Consisting predominantly of quotations, most of Wollstonecraft’s hundreds of reviews for the Analytical Review are short – in keeping with the common practice of the time, probably sent to the publisher on a single sheet – and they are signed at the end only with an initial or initials. Ascribing them to the various authors working for Johnson can thus be a risky venture. Mixing external evidence with stylistic and content analysis, Ralph Wardle argues in a pioneering article that Wollstonecraft contributed reviews under the signatures of M, W, and T and also the unsigned reviews in a run of short notices ending with such a signature. (He thought T might stand for “teacher” because he first noticed it in an essay on education.) Key evidence is that the M, W, and T signatures disappear while Wollstonecraft was abroad; after returning from France she picks up only the M. Subsequent scholars have queried parts of his hypothesis, but this essay substantially validates it.2
Although Wollstonecraft reviewed books about children, education, women, travel, and even boxing, fiction – sentimental fiction in particular – seems to have been her niche. Accordingly, Wollstonecraft’s literary reviews are documents in the history of sensibility, offering a case study of how a female journalist, assigned seemingly unpromising “ladies’ subjects” like sentimental novels, managed to create a resonant voice as cultural and literary critic. As such a critic, Wollstonecraft is a woman of sense who resists the model of femininity typically inscribed in these texts, which represent women according to a linguistic and structural etiquette of powerlessness and marginalization, often showing them being emotionally and physically carried away. Such is the stock-in-trade of even a first-rate popular novelist like Charlotte Smith. For the female writer and critic, sentimental fiction’s overwrought language and behavioral code of extreme emotional responsiveness – a submission to forces outside the self that romanticizes passivity – poses a threat Wollstonecraft and others resist by recommending the power and the dignity of reason. If the latter eighteenth century witnessed the transformation of the Man of Reason (as Genevieve Lloyd’s study labels patriarchal discourse) into the Man of Feeling, a comparable redefinition of womanly discourse empowered the female pen to include the rational along with the affective.3 This appropriation of reason most notably informed educational writing by women – Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is above all a pedagogical text critiquing female socialization in sensibility and advocating rational instruction in its place. Late in the century, this appropriation of reason also modified the feminine narrative tradition as well, the fiction of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen being only the most obvious examples. It especially directs the critical commentary of women of sense who worried about sensibility’s effects on the readers of their sex, especially what they liked to call the “rising generation.”4
But while Wollstonecraft demystifies the contemporary feminine specialty, the novel of sensibility so often “told in letters” and written by “A Lady” that was so instrumental in enabling her to evolve her own distinctive voice, she was certainly not ready to jettison the positive attributes associated with feminine sensibility. No reader could get beyond the early chapters of Mary, A Fiction (1788) or of The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria (1798), the novel she struggled to complete in the last months of her life, without recognizing their kinship with the contemporary sentimental narrative she so often reviewed. Indeed, her letters, the epigraph from Rousseau that supplies the theme of Mary, as well as the several Analytical Review essays on his writings, all testify to the fact that she, like numerous sister writers, was “half in love” with the seductive philosopher of feeling (Letters, 263). Wollstonecraft’s whole career might be read, then, in terms of a dialectic of sense and sensibility, to recollect the title of Austen’s later novel. But whereas Austen writes a text in which sisters for the most part grow up dichotomously and learn from one another’s experience, Wollstonecraft assumes a maternal stance toward the imagined girl readers of the fictions she considers, and through her own voice offers an educative example of the integration she desires. The rationally responsible yet feelingly protective attitude she exhibits toward her pupils is encoded in her critical commentary as well as in her persona. While in real life, educating and socializing one’s charges (and oneself) is problematic, the reviewer’s authority can banish fears, remedy disorders, and textualize a strong self-image in the process of instructing others.5 Along with the “Hints” set down for the unwritten second part of the Rights of Woman and with Wollstonecraft’s most mature statement of her aesthetics, published in 1797 as “On Artificial Taste” and retitled “On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature” by her widower William Godwin, Wollstonecraft’s reviews both discuss and stylistically enact a poetics of change, an attempt to unite an aesthetic of spontaneity and affect with a morality of reason that is the hallmark of her career.
Sometimes sportive, sometimes serious, Wollstonecraft as feminist reader displays a lively critical intelligence and, in accordance with her revisionist ideology, a determination to exercise her own independent judgment. Her letters to Johnson sketch the reviewer’s routine – returning the batch of books finished, asking whether “you wish me to look over any more trash this month.” Her boredom sometimes surfaces in public laments about the lot of “poor Reviewers, who have lately perused so many bad novels,” sometimes in digs at the run-of-the-press witlings who try her patience: “The writer of this Poem, we are informed, is between 15 and 18 years of age. We believe it.” Most often and most instructively, however, her irritation focuses on women writers and readers, on the stereotypically feminine tales that these unthinking mothers and lovelorn daughters produce and consume. She takes for granted a growing and predominantly female readership hungry for narrative, describing the audience of the very popular Charlotte Smith as “her fair countrywomen,” for example.6 She comments about the growing supply of authoresses eagerly catering to that appetite for fantasies. “The best method, I believe, that can be adopted to correct a fondness for novels is to ridicule them,” she later observes in the Rights of Woman. The model of reading based on therapeutic mockery she then details recapitulates much of her own critical practice: “if a judicious person, with some turn for humour, would read several to a young girl, and point out . . . how foolishly and ridiculously they caricatured human nature, just opinions” might replace “romantic sentiments” (VRW 5:258). Reading self-consciously as an enlightened woman, shaping what she reads to serve her own controversialist’s purpose, Wollstonecraft criticizes her subjects for writing like Woman, for serving as passive channels through which linguistic and cultural codes flow without resistance. She finds oppression and repression inscribed in the feminine texts she reads, never the self-expression her aesthetic demands.
Wollstonecraft’s objections to her period’s “scribbling women” are at once aesthetic and ideological, for questions of literary artistry and questions of human values are always intimately interrelated for her. Literarily, the scribbles are vapid: “sweetly sentimental,” “milk and water periods,” “insipid trifling incidents,” “much ado about nothing,” “matter so soft that the indulgent critic can scarcely characterize it” go her kinder descriptions.7 A “great number of pernicious and frivolous novels”– “those misshapen monsters, daily brought forth to poison the minds of our young females” – waste the time of readers, plunging them “into that continual dissipation of thought which renders all serious employment irksome” as well as the time of writers, especially schoolgirl romancers, who should work to improve their minds. Instead, young consumers turn into young producers: “From reading to writing novels the transition is very easy.”8 When she finds a novel written by a very young lady, Wollstonecraft repeatedly advises her to “throw aside her pen” or even to “throw her bantling into the fire”; perhaps such an “author will employ her time better when she is married.” Seymour Castle; or, the History of Julia and Cecilia: An Entertaining and Interesting Novel (1789) – its title, like those of its sister works, weary with cliché – provokes her to even stronger strictures: “This frivolous history of misses and lords, ball dresses and violent emotions . . . is one of the most stupid novels we have ever impatiently read. Pray Miss, write no more!”9
Often tart with women writers, Wollstonecraft counters the indulgent gallantry male reviewers usually reserve for a fair belletrist. Just as she later does in the Rights of Woman, in her reviews she takes the position of the firm, wise mother brooking no nonsense from the deficient mothers and daughters she instructs. Most female novels, she claims, adapting Pope, have no character at all. Content to copy their predecessors in this “flimsy” kind of writing– Richardson, who modernized romance; Burney, who feminized it; and Sterne, who whipped literary affect into syllabubs of sentimentality – “like timid sheep, the lady authors jump over the hedge one after the other, and do not dream of deviating either to the right or left.” Wollstonecraft finds the typical woman’s novel both stylistically and morally derivative. She recommends Clarentine: A Novel (1796) to “young female readers,” who perhaps have more patience than “poor reviewers, condemned to read though dulness, perched on their eye-lids, invites to sleep or forgetfulness”; and though Sarah Harriet Burney’s fiction was published anonymously, Wollstonecraft accurately locates the model for the normative lady’s heroine “exactly proper, according to established rules. . . . an imitation of Evelina in water-colours.”10
A work like Mrs. Elizabeth Norman’s The Child of Woe (1789), having no “marked features to characterize it,” Wollstonecraft pronounces “a truly feminine novel. . . . the same review would serve for almost all” of these “ever varying still the same productions.” She registers her pleasure “when written by a lady, is not inserted in the title page” and insists that she can “guess the sex of the writer” by her “tissue of pretty nothings.”11 She even offers a “receipt for a novel” composed of favorite female narrative ingredients: “unnatural characters, improbable incidents, and sad tales of woe rehearsed in an affected, half-prose, half-poetical style, exquisite double-refined sensibility, dazzling beauty, and elegant drapery, to adorn the celestial body, (these descriptions cannot be too minute) should never be forgotten in a book intended to amuse the fair.” Add to this framework the usual “decorations, the drapery of woe, grief personified, hair freed from confinement to shade feverish cheeks, tottering steps, inarticulate words, and tears ever ready to flow, white gowns, black veils, and graceful attitudes . . . when the scene is to be pathetic.” “Sensibility,” she finds, “is the never failing theme, and sorrow torn to tatters, is exhibited in . . . moping madness – tears that flow forever, and slow consuming death.” Of course these staples serve woman’s one plot: “The ladies are very fond of a dismal catastrophe, and dying for love is the favorite theme.” They exalt weaknesses into excellences, and “the passion that should exercise the understanding” becomes “the grand spring of action, the main business of life.”12
The women’s heroines all come from the same mold: “these ladies, for such artificial beings must not be familiarly called women, are something like the cherubim under the organ-loft, soft, simple, and good.” Like Austen in her juvenilia, Wollstonecraft satirizes authors’ “pulling the wires to make the puppets . . . faint, run mad, &c., &c.” And she is equally bored with infallible characters who “love and weep by rule,” with “insipid goodness, so imperfect are we!”13 The “faultless monster” is, like Helen Maria Williams’s Julia (1790), “viewed with [readerly] respect, and left very tranquilly to quiet her feelings, because,” without real passion, too perfect for internal conflict, “it cannot be called a contest.” The “most exemplary degree of rectitude in the conduct” of a heroine is not enough for satisfying fiction, which depends on “knowledge of the human heart, and comprehensive views of life.” Wollstonecraft then turns her critique, as she often does, into a discussion of the fiction she values and would try to write in The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria – “A good tragedy or novel, if the criterion be the effect which it has on the reader, is not always the most moral work, for it is not the reveries of sentiment, but the struggles of passion – of those human passions, that too frequently cloud the reason, and lead mortals into dangerous errors . . . which raise the most lively emotions, and leave the most lasting impression on the memory; an impression rather made by the heart than the understanding: for our affections are not quite voluntary as the suffrages of reason.” Although claiming passion and growth through error for her own heroine, Wollstonecraft can praise the pastel charms of first-rate women writers like Williams and Smith, despite their omitting the “workings of passion” from their tales. To the author of Almeria Belmore: A Novel, in A Series of Letters, “Written by A Lady” (1789), she is less generous: “no discrimination of character, no acquaintance with life, nor – do not start, fair lady! – any passion.” And with the writer of The Fair Hibernian (1789), she is downright irascible: “Without a knowledge of life, or the human heart, why will young misses presume to write?” Such authors fuel Wollstonecraft’s outburst in the Rights of Woman at “the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties.”14
Feminine fiction, Wollstonecraft argues, is “sentimental, pumped up nonsense,” falsity masking negation. Affectation – phony feelings and incidents cobbled together from books – covers up a void, but strong writing cannot come “merely from reading . . . mocking us with the ‘shadow of a shade.”’ Because women writers prefer “unnatural sentimental flights” to “catching realities warm with life in the sun-beam that shoots athwart their own path,” eschewing the individual and the original to “tread in a beaten track” (a favorite phrase), they warp their own experience, refining and perpetuating damaging stereotypes. She wanted a more serious and thoughtful examination of authentic human emotion and experience, not “artificial feelings, cold nonsensical bombast, and ever varying still the same improbable adventures and unnatural characters.” Wollstonecraft was neither the first nor the last critic to lament how popular novels foster escapism and misleading expectations of life: “consequently adventures are sought for and created, when duties are neglected and content despised.” Paradoxically, she demonstrates, flaccid fiction commands staying power through its very insubstantiality, its capacity to meld into the reader’s daydreams and let her play at “becoming a heroine,” as a modern study labels the process. However inaccurate as transcripts of life and emotion, the romance’s artificial constructs possess a mysterious power to seep back out of literature and shape the life of which they are distortions in the first place, “to infuse insinuating poison into the minds of the inconsiderate.”15
“No one was harder on women,” one biographer justly remarks of Wollstonecraft’s reviews, and no one was harder on cultural conditioning agents masquerading as fiction, precisely because she hoped to improve her sex and held the novel in high regard. If, as Derek Roper suggests in his survey of eighteenth-century reviewing, Wollstonecraft was more exacting than most of her fellow journalists, the reason surely lies in her ideological commitment, her antennae ever alert to “the circumstances that imperceptibly model the manners of a nation.” Eighteenth-century conservatives and radicals alike fretted over women and novels; this period’s model of the reading experience stresses the exemplary force, for good or ill, of the fiction one imbibes: you are what you read.16
Wollstonecraft’s stories of reading, of the interaction between reader and text, factor gender into this inherited scenario. Her originality is neatly enlisting standard objections to serve the larger purposes of her revisionist social ideology; she makes routine moral cavils shoulder reformist, even radical, values. Wollstonecraft is very much an engaged critic, a contextual critic, a literary and cultural critic whose feminist literary critique, like that of her more recent sisters, is undergirded by cultural analysis, a reexamination of the interweave between art and society, a reassessment of prevailing values and female mythology. Literary commentary, she recognizes, is never purely aesthetic but always socially implicated. Her reviews show her forever exercised over how female life gets inscribed in literature and how literature molds life’s rules and roles, simultaneously pandering to lovelorn “romantic notions” and prescribing narrow limits. “Why,” Wollstonecraft complains of Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791), “do all female writers, even when they display their abilities, always give a sanction to the libertine reveries of men? Why do they poison the minds of their own sex, by strengthening a male prejudice that makes women systematically weak?”17 Systematic weakness, systematic gaps in the texts where real women should be – so goes Wollstonecraft’s typical indictment of the feminine novel, which acquires in her work an emblematic value, both a source and symbol of woman’s artificiality, of her status as cultural fabrication.
Sweet, soft, and hollow, decorous and passionless mannequins, eighteenth-century images of women in literature yield neither the full-bodied female characters nor the liberating feminist values that Wollstonecraft values, that she desires to represent in her fiction to come, and that she already in fact epitomizes in her persona as a reader. Unlike the imitative feminine novelists she censures, Wollstonecraft self-consciously exemplifies the mature woman writer with “sufficient courage to think for herself, and not view life through the medium of books.” Her critical presence is most obvious as the antithesis of that feminine negation she finds in the texts before her. Her self-confident assertion and decided views, her subjective candor (which again recalls early feminist literary criticism), her down-to-earth common sense, even her rough humor and ready wit function to differentiate her critical voice from the languishing maiden airs she derides and mark her as a strong-minded, rational educator, attuned to all the ways women have not been represented in literature. Indicatively, when Wollstonecraft does offer rare praise for a female character, it is the wise and resilient matron like Charlotte Smith’s autobiographical Mrs. Stafford in Emmeline (1788) whom she singles out, not the passive romantic lead, the daughter, but the knowledgeable mother figure who has felt and thought deeply, who demonstrates women’s “power . . . over themselves” rather than over their lovers called for in the Rights of Woman. No copybook tracery of a proper lady, Wollstonecraft reveals herself a real, complex woman with strong feelings and human foibles as well as rational understanding. Irascible, opinionated, enthusiastic, her varied emotional responses contribute to an ongoing dialogue that grants critical detachment and empathic involvement, sense and sensibility, each its due weight. As educative persona and exemplary reader, Wollstonecraft offers her female audience a resistant model of reading that counters their cultural predisposition toward submersion in the events of the text. She asks them to close the gap between their lives and their fantasies, to critique rather than internalize the shopworn images of women in literature, and her strictures on submissive female reading postures slide easily into a broader cultural analysis of female submission.18
Take her very first review – of Edward and Harriet; or, The Happy Recovery: A Sentimental Novel, “By A Lady” (1788) – with its anticipation of the Rights of Woman’s “judicious” reader. Arguing that “ridicule should direct its shafts against this fair game,” the “cant of sensibility,” she pronounces:
Young women may be termed romantic, when they are under the direction of artificial feelings, when they boast of being tremblingly alive all o’er, and faint and sigh as the novelist informs them they should. Hunting after shadows, the moderate enjoyments of life are despised, and its duties neglected; and the imagination, suffered to stray beyond the utmost verge of probability . . . soon shuts out reason, and the dormant faculties languish for want of cultivation; as rational books are neglected, because they do not throw the mind into an exquisite tumult . . . false sentiment leads to sensuality, and vague fabricated feelings supply the place of principles.19
Sentimental fiction is not a negligible literary vogue, Wollstonecraft emphasizes. Novels of sensibility matter because they shape behavior and serve as an index to broader cultural ills. Such reviews point forward to the Rights’ fully developed analysis of contemporary female socialization in “over exercised sensibility.” Woman is “made by her education the slave of sensibility,” Wollstonecraft observes. Citing Samuel Johnson’s definition – “quickness of sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy” – she points out that the “pretty feminine phrases” of sensibility stereotypically denoting the “sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel” are “almost synonymous with epithets of weakness.” Novels, music, poetry, and gallantry “all tend to make women the creatures of sensation”:
their understanding neglected, consequently they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling . . . All their thoughts turn on things calculated to excite emotion; and feeling, when they should reason, their conduct is unstable, and their opinions wavering . . . Miserable, indeed, must be that being whose cultivation of mind has only tended to inflame its passions! A distinction should be made between inflaming and strengthening them.20
The final distinction is characteristic and important. Although Wollstonecraft as a reviewer of commonplace sentimental fiction may stress sense and strategically exemplify how a “judicious” woman must rate “love-lorn tales of novelists,” she is not immune to the legitimate charms of sensibility, and she accords it a privileged role in her evolving feminist aesthetic (VRW 5:194). The weak, false sensibility of cultural stereotype symbolizes imprisonment; the strong, genuine sensibility of romantic genius signifies empowerment.
Wollstonecraft’s reviews, then, imply not just alternative models of reading and female selfhood, but also an alternative aesthetics. Most significantly, her favorite critical counters range themselves firmly against the ways of knowing and valuing that she attributes to popular literature. The derivative, prescriptive, imitative, and affected – false because copied rather than freshly seen: these are her foils for originality, individuality, independence, spontaneity; for the natural, innovative, imaginative, and real, true feeling – good because uniquely felt at firsthand. These are the characteristics of “genius” – always a standard of value for Wollstonecraft and the heart of the revisionist aesthetics she refines throughout her literary progression: direct observation, independent thought, the primacy of the individual imagination as the source of aesthetic truth. To think and to feel for oneself: such phrases inform her reviews and her whole career, from the preface to her first novel, a neat little piece of expressionist aesthetics which unmistakably enrolls Wollstonecraft among the first English Romantics, to her “Hints” for the Rights of Woman, part two, probably written during her reviewing years and packed with maxims about originality, spontaneity, creativity, and imagination; from her personal letters to her final aesthetic manifesto, “On Poetry,” initially and more appropriately entitled “On Artificial Taste.” Like many of her reviews, the “Hints” connect strong passions and strong minds, “enthusiastic flights of fancy” and individuality: “a writer of genius makes us feel – an inferior author reason”; the “flights of the imagination” grant access to truths beyond the “laboured deductions of reason,” necessary though these are (Hints 5:275, 276, 294).
And much as her reviews critique hackneyed sentimental fiction as a symptom of cultural malaise, of that overrefined “state of civil society . . . in which sentiment takes place of passion, and taste polishes away the native energy of character,” “On Poetry” contrasts two styles of feeling and stages of society, the natural and the artificial, into a definitive exposition of Wollstonecraft’s aesthetic values. (It is justly described by one biographer as a virtual call for a romantic revival in poetry.) Here she talks again about the natural as the “transcript of immediate sensations, in all their native wildness and simplicity,” about “real perceptions” versus bookish declamation, revealing once more how much she values strong feelings, exquisite sensibility, and original genius. The last two are equivalent, she suggests, but she also insists that the “effusions of a vigorous mind” reveal an “understanding . . . enlarged by thought” as well as “finely fashioned nerves” that “vibrate acutely with rapture.” Indeed, the understanding, she argues, “must bring back the feelings to nature.”21
Here she also shows, as she does almost obsessively in so many reviews, a preoccupation with style, a conviction that style, substance, and consciousness indivisibly interconnect. Thus I can argue that Wollstonecraft’s critical form and phrasing, to apply her own words, “forcibly illustrate what the author evidently wishes to inculcate.” No one was more keenly aware of how ideological substance spills over into style – witness the often-quoted introduction to the Rights of Woman with its stress on sincerity, its hatred of “that flowery diction which has started from essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and conversation,” and its allegiance to “things, not words!” and Wollstonecraft’s way of scanning artistic expression for its ideological content illuminates her critical practice. In what she says – in the qualities she praises and the recurrent critical counters she deploys – and in the way she says it – in such associated juxtapositions as cold and warm, head and heart, reason and imagination, the “indolent weakness” of “copyists” and the “bold flights of genius,” and in her distinctive style, much commented on and seldom analyzed – Wollstonecraft acts out the aesthetics of change she worked at and returned to throughout her career. Very different from the Latinate and often periodic constructions of her colleagues, her loose, informal sentences embody the associative movement of a thinking and feeling woman’s mind as she strives to integrate the claims and languages of sense and sensibility, giving us, as does her ideal poet, “an image of [her] mind.”22 (Her final assessment of Julia, quoted above, is a good example.) Now spontaneously reactive, now reflective; now curt, now sprawling, her sentences enact her critical premises, according feminist issues a formal significance. Like her mix of Yorkshire colloquialisms and abstract philosophy and her attempts to unite imaginative excursus and rational inquiry, her “running” style – with its propulsive movement and its openness to experience – both mirrors her own mind and typifies the free play of the feminist mind as she defines it. Wollstonecraft has been – and still is – criticized for the supposed disorganization and awkwardness of her style and the seeming structural disorder of her work in general. Certainly her discursive, conjunctive style differs from the subordinated linear style typical of the period. The latter lays out ideas already classified and arranged; Wollstonecraft’s syntactic structure mirrors the shifting perspective of the writer’s mind, piling up clauses and phrases as they occur. It is the formal analogue of her ideological position, its roughness testifying to the sincerity and artlessness she values.23
Wollstonecraft’s style affirms the emotive and imaginative complex that Romantic and feminist critics have accused Wollstonecraft of devaluing.24 Her habitual contrasts of “warmth of imagination” and “truth of passion” with “romantic rants of false refinement” or “cold romantic flights” and “false enervating refinement” must be read as the thoughtful cultural critique that they are, as legitimate concern over the impact (especially on women and the young) of sensibility as literary and behavioral cliché. Like Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and other female contemporaries who expose the literary dependence of feminine feelings, Wollstonecraft deplores a congealing of literary language into jargon, a hardening of the emotional arteries so that women feel and act by rote, casting themselves as derivative sentimental heroines and losing touch with cultural realities and their own thoughts and feelings. Wollstonecraft’s real quarrel with women writers centers around affectation, falsity, and imitation; it is never with sensibility, passion, imagination, or fiction per se, and certainly not with narrative that feelingly renders female experience. That was her own aspiration in The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria: “it is the delineation of finer sensations which, in my opinion, constitutes the merit of our best novels. This is what I have in view,” she states in the preface, and the novel values (perhaps even overvalues) the heroine’s “true sensibility, the sensibility which is the auxiliary of virtue, and the soul of genius.” If Wollstonecraft as reviewer worries about the spurious sensibility of works that “engender false notions in the minds of young persons, who read with avidity such flimsy productions, and imagine themselves sentimental, when they are only devoid of restraining principles, the sure and solid support of virtue,” Wollstonecraft the novelist tries to depict the real thing interacting with rational morality in a woman’s mind.25
Throughout her career she defined sensibility in glowing terms, repeatedly equating it with genius and forever waxing ardent over Rousseau’s ardors; her reviews talk of “that glow of imagination, which constitutes the grand charm of fiction”; and she voices genuine respect for the rare good novel, freshly and imaginatively realized. Praising Robert Bage’s Man As He Is (1792), she observes that the increasing crop of novels, “the spawn of idleness,” might lead “the inconsiderate . . . to conclude, that a novel is one of the lowest order of literary productions; though a very different estimation seems to be suggested by the small number of good ones which appear.” She even offers a friendly welcome to romance as a genre (witness her review of the historical Earl Strongbow [1789] or Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Italian [1797]). She insisted early in her reviewing career that “to write a good novel requires uncommon abilities,” something very different from “exhibiting life through a false medium” or a “sickly veil of artificial sentiment,” and the final sentence of her last notice for the Analytical Review, published in May 1797, a few months before her death, makes an appropriate envoi. The story is Hubert de Sevrac: A Romance of the Eighteenth Century (1796) by Mary Robinson, a sister feminist who struggled, just as Wollstonecraft was then struggling with Maria, to mesh original cultural insights with the exaggerated effusions of feminine romance. All ornamental sentiment, the book has “no centre,” Wollstonecraft observes, although “irradiations of fancy flash through the surrounding perplexity, sufficient to persuade us, that she could write better, were she once convinced, that the writing of a good book is no easy task,” perhaps especially for a woman.26
But although Wollstonecraft’s creative work cannot wholly escape from literary conventions, her critical practice demonstrates a surer mastery of these codes, a defter updating of textual femininity, not in the guise of a heroine but of a critical persona, who engenders an alternative selfhood while educating her audience. Embodying the ideal she would teach, this lively voice works against stale, parasitic, adulterated ways of living and feeling. Wollstonecraft explicitly urges women readers to think and feel for themselves; implicitly, she shows them how in a critical discourse that is also a mode of self-definition. Eager to encompass experience, following her consciousness even at the risk of apparent self-contradiction, Wollstonecraft as critic dances nimbly between the flaccid, love-fixated romance she deplores and the romantic genius she valorizes, between a narrative mode that formalizes passive subjection and one that facilitates passionate subjectivity, between fictive conventions and romantic freedoms. Although she emphasizes understanding and gibes at “double-refined sentiments,” romantic impulse fuels Wollstonecraft’s cultural ideology as much as it does that ideology’s aesthetic analogue: individual protest, passion, and perception, as well as an insistence on personal growth, self-definition, and self-realization, undergird everything she wrote. Her social thought, literary criticism, and artistic experiments interplay and explicate one another, and they are all energized by her emergent feminist ideology’s catalyzing force. Pursuing reason with emotional intensity, privileging passion while reining in sensibility, subtending a brisk no-nonsense critical posture with self-referentiality, Wollstonecraft the feminist reader shapes the critic’s task to her own purposes and converts the bland fodder she reviews to nourish her own political aesthetics.
As a well-rounded woman exemplifying how reviews do indeed offer “points of access to the intellect and sensibility of the reviewer,” Wollstonecraft demonstrates that a cool head need not preclude a warm heart, that “flights of feelings” are not incompatible with “the slow, orderly walk of reason,” that women’s heads can “become, a balance for our hearts.” As woman critic and model to her readers, Wollstonecraft borrows the best of two discourses; appropriating reason, distinguishing true from false sensibility, she manages a stance and style that blend the languages of reason and feeling to her own humanist purposes.27
1. The “forward-looking” Analytical Review, as Walter Graham points out, “encouraged . . . the romantic reaction in English literature,” reflecting “the romantic or sentimental drift of literature during the 1790s better than any other periodical,” English Literary Periodicals (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1930), 221, 195, 220.
2. See Ralph M. Wardle, “Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer,” PMLA 62 4 (December 1947), 1000–9, and his 1951 biography Mary Wollstonecraft: a Critical Biography, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press [Bison Books], 1966). Working independently from unpublished papers, Elbridge Colby also identifies T, M, and unsigned reviews followed by M as Wollstonecraft’s work; see his The Life of Thomas Holcroft, 1925, 2 vols. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968). In his “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reviews,” Notes and Queries n.s. 5 (January 1958), 37–8, and in Reviewing before the “Edinburgh,” 1788–1802 (London: Methuen, 1978), Derek Roper criticizes Wardle’s hypothesis, citing a 1796 review of The Monk, which he argues is not as moral as expected from Wollstonecraft. In 1961, however, this review (with three others, all signed only at the end) was identified by Eleanor L. Nicholes from manuscript as Wollstonecraft’s work, “SC 15,” Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:152–57. Roper also questions attributions that would give Wollstonecraft an occasional brief notice on topics like boxing, but the kinds of reviews and the initials of different reviewers are remarkably consistent, as noted in Gerald P. Tyson’s study of the journal’s publisher, Joseph Johnson: a Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979). Finally Roper insists that truly anonymous material was part of the Analytical Review, as evidenced by unsigned final notices, but these are normally the abstracts from foreign periodicals, a special feature of the Analytical Review. Roper’s 1978 book runs to the opposite extreme, attributing to Wollstonecraft (165) a review even Wardle’s generous hypothesis did not countenance, one signed DM, Review of Henry, by the Author of Arundel [Richard Cumberland], Analytical Review 21 (May 1795), 511–16, when Wollstonecraft was romantically entangled with Gilbert Imlay and not reviewing. DM (and MD, its variant) are clearly the insignia of another reviewer.
The most thorough published study of attribution is Sally Stewart, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to the Analytical Review,”Essays in Literature 11/2 (Fall 1984), 187–99. Stewart points out some of the parallels between the M, W, and T reviews, suggesting these are by the same person. In addition to close stylistic echoes and content parallels, these reviews contain frequent internal cross references, indicating that one person was writing under the three signatures, and they dovetail with the style and concerns of Wollstonecraft’s known works.
A hitherto unnoticed way to explain the T signature is that Wollstonecraft sometimes signs her name M Wt (e.g., Letters, 210); she may have dropped the W and T after her return because her usual signature then was Mary Imlay. Interestingly, two previously unnoticed brief reviews signed MI appear in March 1796: Review of Maria; or, The Vicarage, Analytical Review 23 (March 1796), 294; and Review of Angelina: A Novel, in A Series of Letters, by Mrs. Mary Robinson, Analytical Review 23 (March 1796), 293–4. (Letters, 385, verifies that Wollstonecraft had indeed read Angelina.) Shortly thereafter Wollstonecraft had her final break with Imlay; MI henceforth disappears and only M reviews continue until her death. These two reviews, however, are not stylistically distinctive enough to be conclusive. The editors of the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, however, revert to a more conservative stance than Wardle or I take.
Because most of Wollstonecraft’s reviews are brief, my references refer to the entire review. Most of Wollstonecraft’s reviews are reprinted in Works, 7. For a more elaborated discussion, see my “Sensibility and the ‘Walk of Reason’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique,” Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics, ed. Syndy Conger McMillen (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 120–44, from which this essay draws.
3. See Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
4. For a discussion that places Wollstonecraft’s views on novels and education alongside the views of other female educational reformers as well, such as Madame de Genlis, Clara Reeve, Catharine Macaulay, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Priscilla Wakefield, Hannah More, and Maria Edgeworth, see my “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books,” Children’s Literature, 14, eds. Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 31–59; and “‘A Taste for Truth and Realities’: Early Advice to Mothers on Books for Girls,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 12/3 (Fall 1987, 118–24).
5. I have argued further that Wollstonecraft’s educative persona is at once maternal and self-reflexive in “Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice,” The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 192–210.
6. Letters, 178–9; Review of The Young Lady of Fortune; or, Her Lover Gained by a Stratagem, by A Lady, Analytical Review 4 (August 1789), 480 (T review); Review of King Asa: a Poem in Six Books, by T. May, Analytical Review 8 (December 1790) 464–5 (T is next signature); Review of Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake, by Charlotte Smith, Analytical Review 5 (December 1789), 484–6 (M is next signature).
7. Review of Delia: a Pathetic and Interesting Tale, Analytical Review 5 (Appendix 1789), 580 (M review); Review of The Test of Honour: a Novel, by A Young Lady, Analytical Review 4 (June 1789): 223 (M is next signature); Review of The Parson’s Wife: a Novel, by A Lady Analytical Review 5 (October 1789), 216 (M is next signature); Review of Mount Pelham: a Novel, by the Author of Rosa de Montmorien, Analytical Review 3 (February 1789), 221–2 (W review); Review of A Day in Turkey; or, The Russian Slaves: a Comedy, by Mrs. Cowley, Analytical Review 13 (June 1792), 147–8 (W review).
8. Review of Euphemia, by Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, Analytical Review 8 (October 1790), 222–4 (T review); Review of Henrietta of Gerstenfeld: a German Story, Analytical Review I (June 1788), 209; Review of Agitation; or, The Memoirs of George Woodford arid Lady Emma Melville, by the Author of The Ring and The False Friends, Analytical Review 1 (June 1788), 208 (first issues unsigned).
9. Review of The Vicar of Landsdowne; or Country Quarters: a Tale, by Maria Regina Dalton, Analytical Review 4 (May 1789), 77 (W is next signature); Review of The Cottage of Friendship: A Legendary Pastoral, by Silviana Pastorella, Analytical Review 5 (October 1789), 216 (M review); Review of Almeria Belmore: a Novel, in A Series of Letters, by A Lady, Analytical Review 5 (December 1789), 488–9 (M review); Review of The Fair Hibernian, Analytical Review 5 (December 1789), 488 (M is next signature); Review of Seymour Castle; or, The History of Julia and Cecilia: an Entertaining and Interesting Novel, Analytical Review 5 (November 1789), 361 (M review).
10. Review of The Fair Hibernian; Review of Juliet; or, The Cottager: a Novel, in A Series of Letters, by A Lady, Analytical Review 3 (March 1789), 345 (M is next signature); Review of Clarentine: a Novel, [by Sarah Harriet Burney, Frances Burney’s half-sister], Analytical Review 24 (October 1796), 404 (M review). Rereading Clarentine in 1807, Jane Austen was “surprised to find how foolish it is . . . It is full of unnatural conduct & forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind,” Jane Austen’s Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W Chapman, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 180.
11. Review of The Child of Woe; Review of Agitation; Review of The Bastile; or, History of Charles Townly: a Man of the World, Analytical Review 4 (June 1789), 223 (M is next signature); Review of Delia.
12. Review of The Child of Woe; Review of Emmeline, The Orphan of the Castle, by Charlotte Smith, Analytical Review 1 (July 1788), 327–33 (M review); Review of The Widow of Kent; or, The History of Mrs. Rowley, Analytical Review 1 (July 1788), 208–9 (first issues unsigned); Review of The Exiles; or, Memoirs of The Count of Cronstadt, by Clara Reeve, Analytical Review 4 (June 1789), 221 (M is next signature).
13. Review of Euphemia; Review of Calista: a Novel, by Mrs. Johnson, Analytical Review 5 (September 1789), 98 (M is next signature); Review of Adriano: or, The First of June, A Poem, by the Author of The Village Curate, Analytical Review 7 (May 1790): 39–42 (M review).
14. Review of Edward: Various Views of Human Nature, Taken from Life and Manners, Chiefly in England, by [John Moore], Analytical Review 24 (January 1797), 23–5 (M review); Review of Julia, a Novel: Interspersed with Some Poetical Pieces, by Helen Maria Williams, Analytical Review 7 (May 1790), 97–100 (M is next signature); Review of Ethelinde; Review of Almeria Belmore; Review of The Fair Hibernian; VRW 5:256.
15. Review of Heerfort and Clara: From the German, Analytical Review 5 (December 1789), 487 (M is next signature); Review of The Revolution: An Historical Play, by Lieutenant Christian, Analytical Review 12 (April 1792), 431–4 (T review); Review of The Negro Equalled by Few Europeans: Translated from the French, Analytical Review 7 (August 1790), 462–3 (T is next signature); Review of The Revolution; Review of Doncaster Races; or, The History of Miss Maitland: a Tale of Truth, in A Series of Letters, by Alexander Bicknell, Analytical Review 4 (July 1789), 351 (W is next signature); Review of Emmeline; Review of Doncaster Races.
16. Emily W. Sunstein, A Different Face: the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 172; Roper, Reviewing before the “Edinburgh,” 168; Review of Sketches of Society and Manners in Portugal, in A Series of Letters, by Arthur William Costigan, Analytical Review 1 (August 1788), 451–7 (W review).
17. Review of A Simple Story, by Mrs. (Elizabeth) Inchbald, Analytical Review 10 (May 1791), 101–3 (M is next signature).
18. Review of Celestina: A Novel, by Charlotte Smith, Analytical Review 10 (July 1791), 409–15 (M review); Review of Emmeline; VRW 5:131.
19. Review of Edward and Harriet; or, The Happy Recovery: a Sentimental Novel, by A Lady, Analytical Review 1 (June 1788), 207–8 (first issues unsigned).
20. VRW 5:130, 195, 130, 132, 75, 130, 129.
21. Review of Amusement: a Poetical Essay, by Henry James Pye, Analytical Review 6 (March 1790), 326–7 (M is next signature); Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, 285; OP 7:7, 11.
22. Review of Anna St. Ives: a Novel, by Thomas Holcroft, Analytical Review 13 (May 1792), 72–6 (M review); VRW 5:76; Review of Earl Goodwin: An Historical Play, by Ann Yearsley, Analytical Review 11 (December 1791), 427–8 (M review); OP 7:8.
23. For other views of Wollstonecraft’s style, see Gary Kelly, “Expressive Style and ‘The Female Mind’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century: Transactions of the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment 4 (1980), 1942–9; and Syndy Conger, “The Sentimental Logic of Wollstonecraft’s Prose,” Prose Studies 10/2 (September 1987), 143–58.
24. See, for example, Michael G. Cooke, Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 159–63, and Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: the Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 70–102. Wollstonecraft herself observed that “reason and fancy are nearer akin than cold dulness is willing to allow,” in Review of Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, by William Gilpin, Analytical Review 10 (July 1791), 396–405 (M review).
25. Review of Albert de Nordenshild; or, The Modern Alcibiades: a Novel Translated from the German [by Carl Gottlob Cramer?], Analytical Review 24 (October 1796), 404 (M is next signature); Review of Euphemia; WWM 1:85; Review of Original Letters of the Late Mr. Laurence Sterne, Never Before Published, Analytical Review 1 (July 1788), 335 (W review).
26. Review of New Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa, by the Way of the Cape of Good Hope, in the Years 1783, 84, and 85: Translated from the French of Le Vaillant, Analytical Review 25 (May 1797), 464–75 (M review); Review of Man As He Is: a Novel in Four Volumes [by Robert Bage], Analytical Review 24 (October 1796), 398–403 (M is next signature); Review of Earl Strongbow; or, The History of Richard de Clare and the Beautiful Geralda [by James White], Analytical Review 3 (February 1789), 343–4 (M is next signature); Review of The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents: a Romance, by Ann Radcliffe, Analytical Review 25 (May 1797), 516–20 (M review); Review of Arundel, by the Author of The Observer [Richard Cumberland], Analytical Review 3 (January 1789): 67–69 (W review); Review of The Confidential Letters of Albert; from His First Attachment to Charlotte to Her Death: from “The Sorrows of Werter,” Analytical Review 6 (April 1790), 466–7 (M is next signature); Review of Hubert de Sevrac: a Romance of the Eighteenth Century, by Mary Robinson, Analytical Review 25 (May 1797), 523 (M review).
27. Review of Zelia in the Desart, from the French, by the Lady who Translated Adelaide and Theodore [by Madame de Genlis], Analytical Review 4 (June 1789), 221 (M is next signature); Gerald P. Tyson, Review of Reviewing before the “Edinburgh,” 1788–1802 by Derek Roper, Eighteenth-Century Studies 14/1 (Fall 1980), 71; VRW 5:199, 161.