The Autobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s (review)

Reviewed by: The Autobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s M.O. Grenby (bio) Anjana Sharma. The Autobiography of Desire: English Jacobin Women Novelists of the 1790s. New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2004. iv+268pp. US$23. ISBN 1403-90947-4. The authors discussed in this book are Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and, more surprisingly given the subtitle, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Robert Bage. It is, though, the main title, Autobiography of Desire, that requires more elucidation. Anjana Sharma is not trying to write biographical criticism, to show how the works developed out of the lives. Indeed, she is scathing about such an approach, whether by modern scholars or the contemporary critics who were all too happy to revile Memoirs of Emma Courtney or Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman as scandalous fictionalizations of Hays's and Wollstonecraft's lives. But Sharma does characterize the work of these novelists as "fiction that drew its power from their own experience of the essentially reductive and divisive nature of women's sexuality" (12). As educated, intelligent, and active women in 1790s Britain, their desire—sexual and intellectual—was continually thwarted. Their sense of repression necessarily thrust its way into their fiction, making their novels accounts of "intellectual confinement and the resultant psychic dissonance" (135). These authors seized on fiction as the only way to voice their opinions as well as the best instrument of ideological penetration (7–9). Thus, writes Sharma, these Jacobin novels represent a "struggle to inscribe a new female identity through fiction" (201). Sharma explains that the aim of her book is to revise the history of 1790s political fiction that appeared in Gary Kelly's influential English Jacobin Novel (1976), which she labels a sometimes "patronizing and derogatory" account (216). Sharma is determined to include more women writers and to investigate how their responses differed from those of their male contemporaries. This is the strength of Sharma's book, but also its weakness. Her most interesting point is that the women writers were never able to come to the same hopeful conclusions as the men. For the women writers, Sharma explains, there could be no happy ending. Thus, "while the Jacobin men construct fictions where the protagonists at least triumph partially because of their break with the tyranny of custom and tradition, the women novelists portray [End Page 519] how the break from established patriarchy brings only despair, desertion and sometimes death" (21). Even marriage, the longed-for conclusion to so many novels, became another sort of bastille in the female Jacobin novel. Some readers might disagree, noting the depressing denouement of Caleb Williams, or seeing a certain Utopianism in the conclusions to Inchbald's Simple Story or Smith's Desmond. Yet Sharma is convincing in this reading of the key text of her study, Wollstonecraft's unfinished novel Maria. For Sharma, the novel's incomplete state is emblematic of the impossibility of a happy resolution with things as they stood. Interesting as such a finding is, her attempt to revise Kelly's book emphasizes how much scholarship has moved on in this area since the 1970s and 1980s. Women writers of the 1790s have been the subject of some excellent revisionist criticism, much of it by Kelly himself, who has continually modified his earlier work. Yet Sharma does not mention his Women, Writing and Revolution (1993), or engage with its findings. Neither does she consider the work of many of the other major critics in this field who have published within the last decade or so, even Eleanor Ty, who covered some of the same ground in her Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (1993). Sharma's footnotes (there is no bibliography) refer to only a handful of works published later than 1990. Perhaps it is not essential for a close textual study to take note of the principal trends of recent criticism, but Sharma's book undoubtedly suffers when she discusses the novels' backgrounds. Considering Charlotte Smith's life, for example, she relies on Florence Hilbish's superseded 1941 biography and takes no account of Smith's recently edited letters. Sharma is also rather selective, considering...

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