SOURCE: "'Ladies . . . Taking the Pen in Hand': Mrs. Barbauld's Criticism of Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists," in Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, Ohio University Press, 1986, pp. 383-97.

[In the following excerpt, Moore reviews Barbauld's essays on novelists and argues that she made important contributions to the history and theory of the novel.]

A versatile woman—poet, essayist, polemicist, hymnwriter, children's writer, educator, critic—Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) never wrote a novel. As an avid reader of novels, as well as a respected writer for nearly forty years, and the editor of Samuel Richardson's Correspondence (1804), she was well-qualified in 1810 to serve as editor of the fifty-volume British Novelists, with an Essay and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, published that year. This collection includes twenty-one novelists, twenty-eight novels, and twenty essays by Mrs. Barbauld, including a long introductory essay, "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing." The purpose of this edition, she says in her introduction, is to present a "series of the most approved novels, from the first regular productions of the kind to the present time." The titles offered in mis collection confirm her judgment, for all the major eighteenth-century novelists (with the exception of Sterne—an unexplained omission) and many of the best and most popular minor novelists are represented. The essays, though varying in length and in thoroughness, collectively constitute a defense of novels as a genre and an attempt to define and illustrate literary principles in novel writing.

This useful collection of essays has received remarkably little attention over the past two centuries. Indeed, Lucy Aikin's reference to it as the "humbler offices of literature" may reflect the attitude of her aunt, Mrs. Barbauld, and certainly Aikin's explanation that the task was undertaken to assuage grief over Mr. Barbauld's suicide in 1808 points to something less than Mrs. Barbauld's total commitment to the project on its own merit. Since then, although scholars frequently have cited Mrs. Barbauld's prefatory remarks on novels in her edition of Richardson's Correspondence, few have ever alluded to the prefaces to British Novelists. Yet these are important for several reasons. Mrs. Barbauld has been justly praised for having written "the most complete and the most accurate history of [by Byron Hall Gibson, in a Ph. D. dissertation, 1931] prose fiction to appear during the years intervening between the publication of John Moore's A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance (1797) and John Colin Dunlop's History of Fiction (1814)." Equally significant is her assertion of the artistic values of the novel at a time when the literary reputation of the genre had not yet entirely outgrown the widespread disapproval common in eighteenth-century criticism. A third important feature is her advocacy of women novelists, who as a group were yet to be taken seriously.

As historian and theoretician of the novel, Mrs. Barbauld synthesizes current ideas and information. She had been preceded not only by John Moore in 1797 but also by Clara Reeve, whose "The Progress of Romance" had appeared in 1785. Criticism of novels, however, was fragmented because most of it appeared incidentally in magazine reviews of individual novels. Nevertheless, from the scattered observations of authors and critics, a distinct body of criticism was emerging, and Mrs. Barbauld's achievement was to give coherent voice to it, through the introductory essay, which provides a historical background and a statement of principles, and through the individual prefaces, which draw upon those principles.

The work reveals Mrs. Barbauld's thorough assimilation of contemporary criticism of novels. J. M. S. Tompkins [in The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, 1961] says of the period from 1770 to the end of the century that "the two chief facts about the novel are its popularity as a form of entertainment and its inferiority as a form of art." The opening sentence of Mrs. Barbauld's introductory essay demonstrates her awareness of these facts: "A collection of Novels has a better chance of giving pleasure than of commanding respect." She even adopts the conciliatory tone which champions of the novel considered necessary to combat the moralistic opposition, as, for example, in her tentatively worded thesis: "It might not perhaps be difficult to show that this species of composition is entitled to a higher rank than has been generally assigned it." But concession is only a strategy which strengthens her defense of the novel. She addresses the main critical issues: defining the novel, defending it against the moralists, and asserting its authenticity as a literary form. Her formal definition is obviously adapted from Fielding: "A good novel is an epic in prose, with more of character and less (indeed in modern novels nothing) of the supernatural machinery." But as Mrs. Barbauld traces the history of fiction, she reveals her bias in favor of realism—"the closer imitation of nature"—as the crucial trait of the "modern" novel. Thus, in England the "modern" novel begins with Defoe because he was the "first author amongst us who distinguished himself by natural painting." The account of the evolution of the novel has a twofold purpose: to show that "Fictitious adventures in one form or other, have made a part of polite literature of every age and nation" and to show that the popular contemporary form, the novel, has a superior moral advantage because of its closer imitation of nature. She argues, "If the stage is a mirror of life, so is the novel, and perhaps a more accurate one, as less is sacrificed to effect and representation." Moreover, she shrewdly connects the moral significance of the novel with its great popularity.

Some perhaps may think that too much importance has been already given to a subject so frivolous, but a discriminating taste is no where more called for than with regard to a species of books which every body reads. It was said by Fletcher of Saltoun, 'Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws.' Might it not be said with as much propriety, Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the system?

On the other hand, Mrs. Barbauld is at odds with even the defenders of the novel in her defiant dismissal of the traditional idea that the "end and object of this species of writing" is "to call in fancy to the aid of reason, to deceive the mind into embracing truth under the guise of fiction" and in her personal endorsement of pleasure as the chief purpose of novels. "I scruple not to confess," she declares, "that when I take up a novel, my end and object is entertainment; and as I suspect that to be the case with most readers, I hesitate not to say that entertainment is their legitimate end and object."

On the subject of the art of fiction, Mrs. Barbauld suggests some theoretical principles, but without much elaboration. Her introductory essay seems to illustrate Frederick R. Karl's observation of the later eighteenth century that criticism of the novel "remained rudimentary" although "the novel was becoming an acceptable part of critical vocabulary" and thus "without any conscious development of novel theory, the novel [was entering] the literary consciousness. Mrs. Barbauld's summary of the required talents for a novelist implies what might be called rudimentary awareness of novelistic art. She simply lists "the invention of a story, the choice of proper incidents, the ordonnance of the plan, occasional beauties of description, and above all, the power exercised over the reader's heart by filling it with the successive emotions of love, pity, joy, anguish, transport, or indignation, together with the grave impressive moral resulting from the whole." On the other hand, her perception that the novel is an art form goes beyond the rudimentary. When she calls upon the novelist to attend to the truth of "real life and manners" because the novel must in "some respects give false ideas, from the very nature of fictitious writing," her concern is moral, but her subsequent comments are aesthetic:

Every such work is a whole, in which the fates and fortunes of the personages are brought to a conclusion, agreeably to the author's own preconceived idea. Every incident in a well written composition is introduced for a certain purpose, and made to forward a certain plan. . . . it is a fault in his composition if every circumstance does not answer the reasonable expectations of the reader.

The "sagacious reader" actively "lays hold" on some "prominent circumstance" in the novel and interprets its meaning, often predicts the outcome of the story: "And why does he foresee all this? Not from the real tendencies of things, but from what he has discovered of the author's intentions." Fiction, then, is an ordered arrangement by the author, unlike real life, which is "a kind of chance-medley consisting of many unconnected scenes," and probability is not so much related to reality as it is to the successful execution of the novelist's design for the whole.

Not only is Mrs. Barbauld sensitive to artistic manipulation of material behind the illusion of reality, but she is also aware of some of the problems of narrative technique. In her earlier preface to Richardson's Correspondence, she had considered at length the methods of presenting the story, suggesting that the novelist has available three narrative points of view: (1) "narrative or epic," in which the "author relates himself the whole adventure"; (2) "memoirs," in which the "subject of the adventure relates his own story"; and (3) "epistolary correspondence, carried on between the characters in the novel." Her analysis displays considerable insight into the limits of each strategy. The omniscient narrator not only can "reveal the secret springs of action" and provide "knowledge which would not properly belong to any of the characters," but can also stand as a barrier between the fiction and the reader unless "he frequently drops himself and runs into dialogue." The method of the "memoirs" solves the problem of the too-intrusive narrator, communicates the "warmth and interest a person may be supposed to feel in his own affairs," and permits the narrator to "dwell upon minute circumstances which have affected him." Yet the first-person narration is most difficult, for the novelist must maintain a style suitable to the "supposed talents and capacity of the imaginary narrator," must write under the restriction that "what the hero cannot say, the author cannot tell," and also must create, in effect, "two characters"—the hero "at the time of the events to be related," and, simultaneously, the hero "at the time he is relating them." She concludes that the first-person point of view is the "least perfect mode." The epistolary method gives the illusion of immediacy; it is dramatic because all characters speak "in their own persons"; it can present multiple points of view; it can even supply information furnished by the omniscient narrator through such devices as omitted or lost letters and elaborations or digressions within letters. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that letters should be so voluminously and conveniently produced and preserved so as to present a "connected story"; the "insipid confidant" is an irritating literary expedient; in sum, the epistolary method is "the most natural and the least probable way of telling a story." All her remarks reveal a preference for the technique that best permits the author to "drop himself"—unless the narrator is like Fielding, in whose narrative everything is "continually heightened by the contrast between the author's style and his view of things, and the characters he is holding up to ridicule." Theoretical discussions of the various narrative points of view were rare at the time, and, as Miriam Allott comments [In Novelists on the Novel, 1966]: "It says much for Mrs. Barbauld's perspicacity that subsequent novelists' views on narrative technique coincide at so many points with hers." Mrs. Barbauld does not repeat her theories on point of view in the introductory essay to British Novelists, but they are evident in practice in a number of the prefatory essays.

If, on the whole, Mrs. Barbauld pays more attention to defending the moral value of novels and less to novelistic theory in the introductory essay, she is at least addressing the most urgent problem her contemporaries saw in the novel. Moreover, she has more theoretical insight than one might expect. The individual prefaces to British Novelists similarly include much that is generalized and conventional in the way of criticism, but also a good deal that is specific and technical. Perhaps rudimentary as criticism, the prefaces also confirm Tompkins's observation that despite primary emphasis in later eighteenth-century criticism on the "moral, probability and characterization of a novel" and on style, there appeared "a growing interest in form." A summing up of Mrs. Barbauld's contribution to the theory of the novel must acknowledge that her views were mostly derivative and general, yet not entirely conventional and often quite perspicacious and pointed.

It is not especially surprising that a widely read, experienced writer like Mrs. Barbauld, once she had accepted her task, could sort out and unify critical assessments of her day, particularly on a subject as congenial as novels. Somewhat more surprising is the importance she accords women writers, for her reputation today—and in her time—is not that of an ardent feminist. A spokeswoman for radical dissenters in such human rights issues as movements to repeal the Corporation and Test Acts and to abolish the slave trade, she was not notably interested in specifically feminist causes, although she numbered a few women writers among her friends—Hannah More, Joanna Baillie, and Maria Edgeworth, particularly. Her own uncomfortable experience as a remarkably well-educated woman taught her that women "ought only to have such a general tincture of knowledge as to make them agreeable companions to a man of sense"; indeed, "to have a too great fondness for books is little favorable to the happiness of a woman." Her most direct comment on the feminist issue is a poem entitled "The Rights of Woman," which opens with an ironic address to "injured Woman" and concludes with the assertion that women ought to "abandon each ambitious thought" and accept the "soft maxims" of "Nature's school," which teach that "separate rights are lost in mutual love." Although Mrs. Barbauld was occasionally grouped with feminists, even her political enemies knew better, as a critic for the Anti-Jacobin Review indicated when he disputed her inclusion in a political satire upon certain "sisters in femality" and argued, quite correctly, that Mrs. Barbauld "must reprobate with me the alarming eccentricities of Miss Wollstonecraft." A. R. Humphreys [In Modern Language Review, 1946] has classified Mrs. Barbauld as belonging among conservative Bluestockings who "contented themselves with enhancing the prestige of women by a peaceful penetration of male preserves, rather than by blowing trumpets for independence." This estimate of her position seems much more accurate than a recent study which has included Mrs. Barbauld among those who "discriminated against [their] own sex."

In the British Novelists, if Mrs. Barbauld does not quite blow trumpets for the advent of women novelists, she comes very close to doing so. Not only does she recognize the dominance of women novelists, but she also welcomes it, as one paragraph, devoted to that point, states:

And indeed . . . it may safely be affirmed that we have more good writers in this walk living at the present time, than at any period since the days of Richardson and Fielding. A very great proportion of these are ladies: and surely it will not be said that either taste or morals have been losers by their taking the pen in hand. The names of D'Arblay, Edgeworth, Inchbald, Radcliffe, and a number more, will vindicate the assertion.

Several features signify Mrs. Barbauld's efforts to do justice to the women novelists. Of the twenty-one authors in British Novelists, eight are women, and of the twenty-eight novels, twelve are by women. But it is not simply numerical apportionment that reveals her respect for these women, nor is her interest compelled by the common opinion she shares that the typical novel reader is female, often "a young woman in the retired scenes of life," for whom good novels proffer sound moral education, especially with respect to people "whom it is safer to read of than to meet." Rather, the evidence is in the prefaces, in which she evaluates the work of the writers, and to some extent in the account of the history of the novel.

The recognition of women in the history of the novel is a significant point in Mrs. Barbauld's long introductory essay. Assuming realism to be the distinguishing trait of the developing novel, she marks its beginning from the period when "a closer imitation of nature began to be called for." This landmark in the history of the novel is displayed by the work of Madeleine de Scudéry, along with that of La Calprenède, who "in the construction of the story, came nearer to real life." The next important figure of the developing genre is also a woman, Mme de la Fayette, whose fiction is the first to depict truthfully "the manners of cultivated life and natural incidents related with elegance" and thereby the first to "approach the modern novel of the serious kind." In England, of course, she recognizes Defoe's realism as marking the beginning of the genre, after which "in the reign of George the Second, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollet, appeared in quick succession; and their success raised . . . a demand for this kind of entertainment." Nevertheless, she includes male and female novelists impartially, with no divisions by gender or even by such rankings as "major" and "minor." She mentions Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Manly, citing some moral objections to their novels; more approvingly, Mrs. Haywood, Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. West, Miss Fielding, and Mrs. Opie; and most enthusiastically, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Burney, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Radcliffe.

While not discriminating against women writers, Mrs. Barbauld does ponder the differences between men and women novelists. Women, she observes, give a more "melancholy tinge" and less humor to their works than men. The chief reason, she thinks, is circumstance: "Men, mixing at large in society, have a brisker flow of ideas." In addition, she suggests that only "the stronger powers of man" have the ability to produce humor, the "scarcer product of the mind." The product of woman's mind, in contrast, is "sentiment," resulting from the societally imposed necessity to "nurse those feelings in secrecy and silence" which men usually experience only "transiently" and "with fewer modifications of delicacy." Women, therefore, unlike men, "diversify the expression of [feelings] with endless shades of sentiment." Thus, she perceptively notes, it is isolation that gives a distinctive color to the creations of the feminine imagination."

The women whose works are represented in the collection of novels—and who are thus treated more fully—are Clara Reeve, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Moore Brooke, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Turner Smith, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and Maria Edgeworth—certainly a stellar group. Mrs. Barbauld deals with them justly and generously. In addition to biographical information, the prefaces include general assessments of the work of the authors and more detailed comments on a variety of matters such as structure and style and theme.

In each preface, usually at the beginning, Mrs. Barbauld summarizes in a few words the general reputation of the novelist. In the "Origin and Progress," though not applying any systematic rankings, she indicates that some novels are noteworthy for "excellence," some for "singularity," and some for moderate popularity "though not of high celebrity." These somewhat unequal categories roughly guide her overall assessments. Essentially they are subjective, but they also reflect popular critical opinions. Sometimes she evaluates in broad terms, as in the case of Clara Reeve who can claim only "a moderate degree of merit," or Charlotte Lennox, who is "very respectable," or even Fanny Burney, of whom she declares: "Scarcely any name, if any, stands higher in the list of novel-writers than that of Miss BURNEY." Maria Edgeworth is a novelist "fully in possession of the esteem and admiration of the public." In other cases, style is the telling trait, as with Mrs. Brooke and Mrs. Smith, whose novels are characterized by "elegance." Mrs. Barbauld also gives high marks for innovation. She admires Mrs. Inchbald's originality, and especially Mrs. Radcliffe's: "Though every production which is good in its kind entitles its author to praise, a greater distinction is due to those which stand at the head of a class; and such are undoubtedly the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe—which exhibit a genius of no common stamp." On the whole, Mrs. Barbauld's rankings hold good even today.

Mrs. Barbauld sometimes accords the individual elements of fiction the cursory treatment typical of the times, especially with respect to plot. For example, she complains that Frances Brooke's Emily Montague is not "interesting in the story" because descriptive passages predominate. But her criteria of coherence and unity are implicit in her praise of Brooke's Lady Julia Mandeville as a "simple, well connected story" and of Clara Reeve's Old English Baron as a "simple and well connected" story. By the same standard she censures as "a fault in the story" the "unravelling" of The Mysteries of Udolpho, which "depends but little on the circumstances that previously engaged our attention." Frederick R. Karl notes [in The Adversary Literature, 1974] that the concept of coherent plot structures in eighteenth-century novels evolved from the effort to counteract and control the episodic nature of earlier fiction, largely by focusing more on character than on events. Something of this attitude is evident in many of Mrs. Barbauld's remarks about plot. The objection to the loose episodic plot is clear in her criticism that The Female Quixote is "spun out too much." A feeling that plot should be subordinate to other elements lies behind her identification of the problem with stories characterized by the "strong charm of suspense and mystery," which is that at "the end of the story, the charm is dissolved, we have no wish to read it again."

Mrs. Barbauld's approval of the originality of the women novelists often focuses around their efforts to work out plots that center on character or theme more than events. She admires as "a new circumstance" the marital situation in Burney's Cecilia which "forms, very happily, the plot of the piece." She likes the characterization of the miser, Briggs, because "it is not the common idea of a miser . . . an originality is given to it" ("Miss Burney," 38:iv-v). Inchbald's "originality both in the characters and the situation" is illustrated by A Simple Story, which is not a "simple story" but "two distinct stories, connected indeed by the character of Dorriforth, which they successfully serve to illustrate."

Burney and Inchbald also represent laudable achievement in narrative technique. Significantly, both are praised for experimenting with points of view that conceal the authorial presence. Mrs. Barbauld praises Burney for dialogue "pointedly distinguished from the elegant and dignified style of the author herself." She is not simply addressing the issue of decorum. Fanny Burney's technique has the effect of drama: "every thing seems to pass before the reader's eyes." In Cecilia, for example, "We almost hear and feel the report of the pistol." Similarly, she finds it "a particular beauty" of the novels of Elizabeth Inchbald that they are "thrown so much into the dramatic form" that there is "little of mere narrative." What Mrs. Barbauld likes is that "we see and hear the persons themselves; we are but little led to think of the author."

Another example of Mrs. Barbauld's interest in the developing techniques is her responsiveness to Inchbald's manipulation of time in A Simple Story. "The break between the first and second parts of the story has a singularly fine effect. We pass over in a moment a large space of years, and find everything changed. . . . This sudden shifting of the scene has an effect which no continued narrative could produce; an effect which even the scenes of real life could not produce." This is a remarkable concession from a proponent of realism.

Such a concession is, of course, prepared for by the discussion in the introductory essay of the novel as an aesthetic form, determined by the author's controlling hand in accordance with his or her design rather than the chance-medley of real life. Mrs. Barbauld's analysis of Ann Radcliffe's novels provides her the opportunity to illustrate her theory very clearly. As a rationalist, she always preferred sense to sensibility, and Gothic novels did not naturally appeal to her. Yet her recognition of Mrs. Radcliffe in one of her longer prefaces is accorded to a writer breaking new ground and carrying out successfully the design of the whole, no matter how different the design is from fiction which is based in realism or how jarring some elements seem in the execution.

She accepts readily the assumption that Mrs. Radcliffe "seems to scorn to move those passions which form the interests of common novels." Her purposes are otherwise: Radcliffe "alarms the soul with terror; agitates it with suspense, prolonged and wrought up to the most intense feeling." A consequence of these different purposes is clearly different methods. Mrs. Barbauld connects them with the idea of the sublime and, citing Edmund Burke, praises the novelist for being able "perfectly to understand that obscurity . . . is a strong ingredient in the sublime." This focus on obscurity is central; it is the reason for a setting of "vast uninhabited castles, winding staircases, long echoing aisles . . . lonely heaths, gloomy forests . . . the canvass and the figures of Salvator Rosa," or for an atmosphere of "solitude, darkness, low whispered sounds, obscure glimpses of objects." Characterization grows out of these assumptions, too: the "living characters correspond to the scenery:—their wicked projects are dark, singular, atrocious." Mrs. Barbauld's main criticism is aimed only at Mrs. Radcliffe's disruption of such unity, particularly manifest in this Gothic novelist's habit of finally revealing mysteries as merely natural phenomena. The reader is not only disappointed at the kind of explanation offered, but also resistant to any explanation, for the reader has been "affected so repeatedly, the suspense has been so long protracted, and expectations raised so high, that no explanation can satisfy, no imagery of horrors can equal the vague shapings of our imagination."

The criterion of "real life," nevertheless, weighs heavily in Mrs. Barbauld's judgment of other novelists. Thanks to a "discerning eye," Fanny Burney "draws from life, and exhibits not only the passions of human nature, but the manners of the age and the affectations of the day." A virtue of Charlotte Smith's novels is "that they show a knowledge of life," usually of "genteel life," but sometimes of "common life." Comments like these are more usual, partly because they reflect a basic tenet, partly because when selecting representative novels, Mrs. Barbauld chose novels grounded in realism.

Mrs. Barbauld's essays are full of comments on a miscellany of Actional elements, for she is not a systematic critic. She likes good beginnings, which, as in Radcliffe's The Sicilian Romance, remind her of "the tuning of an instrument by a skillful hand." She dislikes improbable or protracted endings, and she dislikes ambiguous endings, such as those in Fanny Burney's later novels, for though it is "true that in human life" one cannot "say whether the story ends happily or unhappily," in Action there should be no doubt. On the other hand, though certainly a moralist herself, Mrs. Barbauld does not like novels that preach or teach too much, a fault she finds in Mrs. Inchbald's Nature and Art, which seems to her less a novel than a vehicle for "reflections on the political and moral state of society." Moreover, Mrs. Barbauld may seem to give first importance to the "very moral and instructive story of the Horrels," for example, but her elaboration of the comment gives greater weight to Burney's ability to dramatize effectively the theme of "the mean rapacity of the fashionable spendthrift." Inappropriate tone jars Mrs. Barbauld's sensibility, as, for example, the "bitter and querulous tone of complaint" that pervades much of the unhappy Charlotte Smith's writings. Similarly, she objects to the "low humour" which "strongly characterizes, sometimes perhaps blemishes," Burney's "genius." She personally enjoys both the "beauties of description" and original verse at which some of these writers excel—Smith, Brooke, and Radcliffe, particularly—but she thinks these elements are a hindrance to "a novel of high interest." On the other hand, such decorative passages may be "very properly placed, at judicious intervals, in compositions of which variety rather than deep pathos, and elegance rather than strength, are the characteristics." Again, these elements are judged in terms of the whole design.

Mrs. Barbauld has never received adequate credit for her work as a critic. Yet she fully appreciated the novel and argued skillfully for its status as an important literary form. Although her theories about realistic representation of character, coherent plot structure, the design of the whole, dramatic narrative techniques, and moral tendency were not at all original, they were nowhere else at the time brought together; nor was there a single, extensive, thorough defense of the novel such as hers. But Mrs. Barbauld had always championed the novel, even as a young writer, for one of her earliest essays argues from the same premise that undergirds her later defense of the novel, that it "exhibits life in its true state" and that "every one can relish the author who represents common life because every one can refer to the originals from whence his ideas were taken." Her history of fiction is important as an attempt to give the novel the prestige of literary tradition, then still a relatively rare concept, and it is a creditable history, even by today's standards.

Finally, Mrs. Barbauld leaves no doubts about the significant role of women in the development of this still young and mistrusted literary form, which, nonetheless, calls upon "talents of the highest order." The introductory essay displays her appreciation of women writers throughout, not only by her references to English novelists, but also by her knowledgeable observations about various contemporary French women novelists, such as the Comtesse de Genlis, Sophie Cottin, Mme de Staël, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, and Mme É lie de Beaumont. Subtly emphatic is her casual manner of giving the works of male and female novelists equal billing: "Many a young woman has caught from such works as Clarissa and Cecilia, ideas of delicacy and refinement." At other times she simply offers women novelists as typical examples of responsible authorship: "The more severe and homely virtues of prudence and oeconomy have been enforced in the writings of a Burney and an Edgeworth." Admirable, too, is Mrs. Barbauld's sensitivity to the different but powerful direction represented by Mrs. Radcliffe's novels. The more detailed analysis of the novels of Radcliffe and Burney signify the higher estimate she accords their work. She does a service, however, to all the women novelists, for she praises them freely and criticizes them seriously. She honestly ponders their distinctions both as novelists and as women novelists, and she grants them their own value as serious writers. Her introductory tribute to the work of the "ladies" who were "taking the pen in hand" is a fitting preamble to the critical and biographical prefaces which follow. They constitute a remarkable, enlightened, and even, to some degree, systematic criticism of the eighteenth-century novel and perhaps the first extended criticism of the woman novelist.