Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (review)

Reviewed by: Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment Evan Gottlieb (bio) Pam Perkins. Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. 320pp. US $86. ISBN 978-90-420-3137-1. This study of three Scottish women and the milieu in which they lived and wrote simultaneously deepens and partially revises our understanding of the place of female writers in Romantic-era Britain. In the early 1990s, studies such as Anne K. Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender (1993) demonstrated how representations of gender and sexuality were central to any critical understanding of “the Romantic ideology.” A few years later, critics began to ask a related question: if women’s issues had once been so central to the culture of British Romanticism, then what had happened to those female writers whose texts now had to be dug out of the archives to be reread? The collective answer, provided by critics such as Clifford Siskin, Catherine Gallagher, and Ina Ferris, was that women were pushed out of the market, and then out of the canon, by factors that included their own frequent (albeit overdetermined) choice to publish anonymously and the increasing professionalization of authorship that favoured their male competitors. As Pam Perkins ably demonstrates, this answer is productively complicated when we turn our critical attention to the successful careers enjoyed by many female Scottish authors throughout the Romantic era. Perkins focuses on three: Elizabeth Hamilton, Anne Grant, and Christian Isobel Johnstone. First, however, Perkins lays out the salient aspects of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Edinburgh that facilitated their professional accomplishments. Whereas most Scots were keen to pro mote their erstwhile capital as “the Athens of the North,” Perkins notes that at least one anonymous novelist sneered that the remarkable literary productivity of its inhabitants also made it “the Birmingham of Literature” (18). Yet it was precisely this combination of Enlightened egalitarianism and a demystified, workaday approach to literary production that allowed women writers to prosper within the city’s literary culture. They also had a built-in advantage when it came to avoiding the increasingly dreaded label of “bluestocking,” benefitting from the general reputation of Scotswomen as “more modest and unassuming” than their English counterparts (37). Nevertheless, even north of the Tweed, Perkins asserts that a delicate balancing act was still required “for women who sought to establish a public, professional literary identity without overtly challenging their society’s ideas of femininity” (53). Each of the women whose careers Perkins considers found her own way to walk this socio-cultural tightrope. Although her first biographer made it appear that Hamilton more or less backed into her literary career, Perkins clearly demonstrates that her success was almost entirely [End Page 381] premeditated. Both of Hamilton’s initial novels, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), were pointed satires—“intellectually ambitious and often overtly polemical” (60)—which easily could have incurred the wrath of the male critical establishment. That they did not certainly owes something to their reactionary sensibilities, but it also speaks to Hamilton’s ability to convince readers that women could participate in contemporary political debates as an extension of, rather than an alternative to, their private lives. Although Perkins does not deny that most of Hamilton’s own ideas were hardly groundbreaking, she finds in her personal correspondence with some of the city’s most famous scientists further evidence of “Hamilton’s ability to blur the line between public intellectual work and private domesticity” (84). Even in Hamilton’s most characteristically Scottish novel, The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), Mrs MacClarty is laid low, not by any lack of domestic energy, but by “her moral and intellectual laziness” (127). It was precisely these kinds of Scottish subjects that Grant excelled at depicting. Yet Grant’s strategy for circumventing the barriers to success for literary women was in some respects the opposite of Hamilton’s: where the latter made clear that she was not to be mistaken for her characters, Grant cultivated a purposeful confusion between herself and her primarily Highland subjects. Letters from the Mountains (1806), which went through four editions in two years, details Grant’s experiences living near Inverness with her...

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