SOURCE: "Sensibility and the 'Walk of Reason': Mary Wollstonecraft's Literary Reviews as Cultural Critique," in Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics; Essays in Honor of Jean H. Hagstrum, edited by Syndy McMillen Conger, Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickoinson University Press, 1990, pp. 120-44.

[In the essay that follows, Myers examines Wollstonecraft's writings for the Analytical Review as attempts by Wollstonecraft to develop her unique voice as a "theorist of gender," particularly as she attempts to combine sensibility and reason into a broader humanism.]

This is a vast commonplace of literature: the Woman copies the Book. In other words, every body is a citation: of the "already-written." The origin of desire is the statue, the painting, the book.…

—Roland Barthes, S/Z

I feel all a mother's fears for the swarm of little ones which surround me, and observe disorders, without having power to apply the proper remedies.

I wish to be a mother to you both.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters

Barthes was by no means the first cultural critic to remark the "vast commonplace of literature" that conjoins gender and reading, language and feeling. Virginia Woolf puzzled over the meanings that might reside in the phrase "women and fiction" and wondered how the former's "difference of view" impinged on the structure and style of the latter.¹ Contemporary feminist critics continue to debate the issue of a distinctively female sensibility, language, and fiction with increasingly sophisticated theoretical rigor. As pioneer feminist literary analysis, Mary Wollstonecraft's critiques for the late eighteenth-century Analytical Review both illuminate the historical development of these issues and provide an instructive example of a woman writer's struggle to define her "difference of view," to evade the "already-written." Wollstonecraft's reviews illustrate her own development as a theorist of gender. They are documents in the history of sensibility and they offer a case study of how a female journalist, assigned seemingly unpromising "ladies' subjects" like sentimental fiction, managed to create a resonant voice as cultural and literary critic. The gendered perspective that shapes her sociocultural analysis of what she reads and her self-representation as reader offer yet another example of the way the latter eighteenth century's particular dilemma of female identity, of a woman's relation to her culture, takes the form of exploring (and attempting to integrate) the languages of sense and sensibility. Jane Austen's familiar title captures a cultural motif. But whereas Austen mothers a text in which sisters grow up dichotomous and learn from one another's experience, Wollstonecraft as critic assumes a maternal stance toward the imagined girl readers of the fictions she considers, her textual self-construction offering an educative example of the integration she desires. As the epigraphs imply, the rationally responsible yet feelingly protective attitude Wollstonecraft exhibited toward her pupils and sisters is also encoded in her critical commentary and persona. But with a crucial difference: if real life socialization of 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.²

Anticipating the issues and the enlightened maternal stance of her later work, Wollstonecraft's reviews address the nexus of gender-sensibility-language-culture in multiple ways, because her attitudes toward what has been termed the period's "feminization of discourse" or "colonization of the feminine" were complex and problematic. Terry Eagleton argues that feminine values relegated formerly to the private realm returned in the later eighteenth century to the male public sphere, transvaluating the ruling ideologies. However that may be, the female that the century stereotypically defined as a woman of feeling would certainly now be joined by The Man of Feeling (1771) that Henry Mackenzie's famous book celebrates, and the "feminine" would be appropriated by male Romantic poets. But as Rousseau—the man of feeling turned sexist philosopher whom Wollstonecraft loved and battled—exemplifies, and as Eagleton observes, this revaluation was bought at a price: "The feminization of discourse prolongs the fetishizing of women at the same time as it lends them a more authoritative voice." Sensibility is woman's glory and her weakness; it liberates and it limits. For the female writer and critic, its overwrought language and behavioral code of extreme emotional responsiveness—a submission to forces outside the self that romanticizes passivity—pose both temptation and threat. Yet if the latter eighteenth century witnessed the transformation of The Man of Reason (as Genevieve Lloyd's recent 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. This appropriation of reason most notably informed educational writing by mother-teachers—Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman (1792) is above all a pedagogics critiquing female socialization in sensibility and advocating rational instruction—but late in the century it also modified the feminine narrative tradition hitherto dominated by formulaic fantasies.³ (Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen are only the most obvious examples.) It also 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

As a feminist literary critic, Wollstonecraft the woman of sense predictably resists the model of femininity typically inscribed in the texts she reviews: the linguistic and structural etiquette of powerlessness, of marginalization, of being emotionally and often physically carried away that is the stock-in-trade of even a first-rate popular novelist like Charlotte Smith. (I once heard a male eighteenth-century scholar remark that he did not believe in "gender genres." He could not have been a student of Smith, Ann Radcliffe, or the many other famous or anonymous female fantasists of sensibility: the period's most prolific fictionist was surely "A Lady.") Yet Wollstonecraft was certainly not ready to jettison the positive attributes associated with stereotypically feminine sensibility. No reader could get beyond the early chapters of Mary, A Fiction (1788) or of the novel she struggled to complete in thelast months of her life without recognizing their kinship with contemporary sentimental narrative. Indeed, her letters, the epigraph from Rousseau that supplies the theme of Mary, and several Analytical Review essays on his writings testify that she, in common with numerous sister writers, was "half in love" with the seductive philosopher of feeling.⁵ Wollstonecraft's whole career might be read as a dialectics of sense and sensibility; here I can examine only her literary reviews for the Analytical (her hundreds of contributions also discuss children, education, women, and travel).⁶ I want to look at these notices both for their subject, which usually takes the form of a running cultural critique, and for the multi-voiced persona who delivers that commentary and who, I will argue, offers alternative models of reading, selfhood, and female aesthetics.

Wollstonecraft served her literary apprenticeship as a reviewer for the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson's new journal (founded in 1788), and she 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.⁷ Her early contributions laid the groundwork for her later achievements—even the earliest show affinities with the themes and language of the Rights of Woman, as I shall demonstrate. Clearly, her immersion in contemporary literature and her attempts to correlate models of reading, writing, and selflhood helped her to formulate her own special feminist stance, that peculiarly Wollstonecraftian blend of rational radicalism and precocious romanticism. In particular, demystifying the contemporary feminine specialty—the novel of sensibility so often "told in letters and written by A Lady"—was instrumental in enabling her to evolve her own distinctive voice, making for an aesthetic at once feminist and romantic and an art, as in Wollstonecraft's unfinished last novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), which aspires to release fictive female experience from tepid conventionalities and endow it with imaginative range and gritty realism. Unlike Mary but like the author's literary reviews, this final fiction decenters naive heroinism by overwriting the daughter's with the experienced mother's voice.⁸ 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.

Wollstonecraft's work as reviewer relates to dual critical contexts—that of her time, with its shifting tastes and romantic trends, and that of our time, for she is not only a pioneer feminist, but also a pioneer feminist critic, whose analysis of the mesh between gender and genre inaugurates the feminist criticalproject. In reading as a historically situated woman, thus grounding her critique in the authority of personal experience, in asserting the continuity of literary and lived response, in insisting on the cultural consequentiality of representations of women, and in thus initiating feminist criticism as a liberating intellectual perspective—a political act, aimed not just at interpreting the world but at changing it through changing the consciousness of readers—in these ways and more, Wollstonecraft's critical mode prefigures the spectrum of concerns informing contemporary feminist literary criticism. Maternal, marginal, morally engaged, even moralistic, Wollstonecraft's stance is of her period, yet also familiar.⁹ Her enterprise calls to mind Adrienne Rich's now classic linkage of cultural survival and critical revision, the feminist re-entry into textual givens in search of clues as to how women have lived and imagined themselves, so that they may see and live afresh: "Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.… We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us."¹⁰

Thus, defining herself against debased or chauvinist romance, against the flood of anonymous cheap fiction and the tradition that Richardson and Rousseau embodied, Wollstonecraft struggles (not always successfully, as Mary and Maria demonstrate) to create her own romantic vision, to rehabilitate Georgian romance as a feminist vehicle that will contain, but not confine, female experience. Unwilling to surrender the woman writer's privileged access to feeling, she strains to infuse this cultural ascription with intellectual backbone and revolutionary energy. In the prefaces to both Mary and Maria, she self-consciously brackets off her protagonists from conventional heroines. Mary aims to "develop a character different from those generally portrayed," an adolescent heroine engendered not from Clarissa or Sophie, but from the "soul of the author" herself, and Wollstonecraft amusingly satirizes sentimental fiction within the novel too, even as she struggles to give birth to a different feminine subjectivity. Valorizing originality and self-expression, she tries to display a thinking woman's mind, "whose grandeur is derived from the operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but drawn by the individual from the original source." Just as pointedly, Maria claims to be, not the typical feminine fiction generated by a "distempered fancy" or a "wounded heart," but a portrayal of woman as she is, a presentation of passions rather than manners, with a mother-heroine who errs and learns from error like a man. The book is intended as a study of female oppression, a contribution to "the improvement of the age." All the same, neither tale escapes the crossed love and fine feelings that are the staples of the period's womanly romance; sensibility is lovingly defined throughout Wollstonecraft's fiction.¹¹

Like many women artists past and present, then, Wollstonecraftchallenges literary traditions she yet perforce inhabits. And like such modern feminist theorists as Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson, she looks for the sins and errors of the literary past, seeks and romanticizes the "grace of imagination."¹² Finding a literary grid of feminine constraints, Wollstonecraft imagines a literary grammar of human possibilities. And as she matures her feminist aesthetic, the artistic correlative of her alternative ideology, she acts out and appropriates for women's enlargement the rich ideological implications of imagination and genius, formulates what might be called a political aesthetics. If the problematic Mary and the inchoate and unfinished Maria reveal the themes and shapes of sentimental fiction in the very process of assimilation to feminist forms, if they try to meld critical intelligence and romantic vision in one heroine—"a woman of sensibility, with an improving mind"—the persona and prose of Wollstonecraft's reviews more smoothly fuse ideological content and artistic expression. These literary notices assert themselves as both explicit discourse about art, especially about women and art, and as implicit exemplification of the values she seeks. Because women who unite "thinking powers" with the 'feeling mind" are conspicuous by their absence from the works she surveys, Wollstonecraft must—and does—fill the void herself.¹³

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"—and 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.¹⁴ She comments about the growing supply of authoresses eagerly catering to that appetite for spun-sugar 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."¹⁵ Reading self-consciously as an enlightened woman, as mother-teacher, shaping what she reads to serve her own controversialist's purpose, Wollstonecraft criticizes her subjects for writing like Woman, forserving 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 literary artistry and human values are intimately interrelated with her). Literarily, the scribbles are vapid: "pretty nothings," "sweetly sentimental," "milk and water periods," "insipid trifling incidents," "much ado about nothing," "matter so soft that the indulgent critic can scarcely characterize it"—so go her kinder descriptions.¹⁶ "The 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"—and of writers, especially schoolgirl romancers who should be improving their minds. Young consumers turn into young producers: "From reading to writing novels the transition is very easy."¹⁷ 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!"¹⁸

Often tart with women writers, Wollstonecraft purposefully counters the indulgent gallantry male reviewers usually reserve for a fair belletrist. Just as she does later in the Rights of Woman, she embodies 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 watercolours."¹⁹

A work like Mrs. Elizabeth Norman's The Child of Woe (1789), "having no marked features to characterize," 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."²⁰ She even offers a "receipt for a novel" composed of favorite female narrative ingredients: "unnatural characters, improbable incidents, and 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."²¹

The women's heroines also 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!"²² 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 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 througherror 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."²³

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 adientures 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 recent 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."²⁴

"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 conservativesand 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. (Johnson's fourth Rambler is the locus classicus.)²⁵ 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?"²⁶ 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 desires. But if these exist only in posse in the fiction she hopes to write, they exist in esse in the persona she presents. 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 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.²⁷

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.²⁸

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 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 theyshould 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.²⁹

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.³⁰ 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 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 expressivist 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.³¹

And much as her reviews critique hackneyed sentimental fiction as a symptom of cultural malaise, of that overrefined "state of civic 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."³²

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 slided 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."³³ (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 additive enjambments, 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.³⁴

That definition affirms the emotive and imaginative complex that Romantic and feminist critics still accuse Wollstonecraft of devaluing.³⁵ 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 theyoung) 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 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.³⁶

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 (1796), 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 or Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Italian). 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, 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.³⁷

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," she 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 mother 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.³⁸

Notes

Research for this essay has been supported in part by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

¹S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, 1970 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 33; Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 148 (14 April 1787); p. 165 (7 November 1787). In the first instance, Wollstonecraft is speaking of the girl pupils to whom she wasgoverness; in the second, of her two younger sisters; "George Eliot," Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 160.

² Although Sense and Sensibility was not published until 1811, it was drafted in the nineties as one among many contributions to an ongoing cultural debate. Wollstonecraft's reviewing exemplifies the "Maternal Thinking" that Sara Ruddick describes as a revisionist feminist project: "the construction of an image of maternal power which is benign, accurate, sturdy, and sane," Feminist Studies 6, no. 2 (Summer 1980), p. 345. 1 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), pp. 192-210. At the same time that I appreciate Mary Poovey's insightful commentary on Wollstonecraft's work in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, Women in Culture and Society Series, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), I cannot agree that the paradigm of proper lady versus woman writer adequately accounts for the author's characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Miriam Brody's identification of an alternative "two Mary Wollstonecrafts—one who loved and one who was contemptuous of love"—seems to me provocative in ways beyond what Brody herself has developed, for it suggests that written self-hood is generated from the contestatory discourses of woman historically available to a writer, "Mary Wollstonecraft: Sexuality and Women's Rights (1759-1797)," Feminist Theorists. Three Centuries of Key Women Theorists, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 41. Poovey's analysis seems to assume that patriarchal ideology works its repressive will upon a previously existent subjectivity, the transcendent Romantic self that much recent work calls into question; for example, Wendy Hollway, "Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity," Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity, ed. Julian Henriques et al. (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 227-63; and Linda Anderson, "At the Threshold of the Self: Women and Autobiography," Women's Writing: A Challenge to Theory, ed. Moira Monteith (Sussex: Harvester; New York: St. Martin's, 1986), pp. 54-71. For similar reservations on Poovey's important study, see reviews by Nancy Armstrong, Modern Language Notes 100 (1985): 1251-57; and Ellen Pollak, Eighteenth-Century Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 1987-88): 260-63. Poovey also seems to me to neglect increasing evidence attesting to female authorial and maternal power in this period that challenges her somewhat monolithic view of the paternal order; see, for instance, Stuart Curran, "Romantic Poetry: The I Altered," Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 185-207; Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Nancy Armstrong, "The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel," Novel: A Forum on Fiction 15, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 127-45, and Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987).

³ Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 13; see also Alan Richardson, "Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine," Romanticism and Feminism, pp. 13-25; Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). As historians of education have long noted, claims for a more rational female education and emergent feminism travel in tandem; for the most recent explication, see Alice Browne, "Women's Education and Women's Rationality," The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), pp. 102-21.

⁴ Earlier twentieth-century studies of Georgian response to fiction typically characterize late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century strictures on the novel as narrow-mindedly moralistic and conservative; see Joseph Bunn Heidler, The History, from 1700 to 1800, of English Criticism of Prose Fiction, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 13, no. 2 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1928); Winfield H. Rogers, "The Reaction against Melodramatic Sentimentality in the English Novel. 1796-1830," PMLA 49, no. I (March 1934): 98-122; G. Harrison Orians, "Censure of Fiction in American Romances and Magazines, 1789-1810," PMLA 52, no. I (March 1937): 195-214; W. F. Gallaway, Jr., "The Conservative Attitude towards Fiction, 1770-1830," PMLA 55, no. 4 (December 1940): 1041-59; and John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760-1830 (Morningside Heights, New York: King's Crown Press, 1943). Taylor in particular interprets worries over the young female reader as a displaced critique of women's increased (although still modest) educational privileges: a put-down of sentimental fiction is a put-down of female learning (ch. 3). Obviously, I read Wollstonecraft's concern from a different perspective; many of my arguments about her attitudes would apply to those of other female educational reformers as well, such as Madame de Genlis, Clara Reeve, Catharine Macaulay, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Priscilla Wakefield, Hannah More, and Maria Edgeworth. (I have explored such educators' attitudes more fully in "Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraftand the Female Tradition in Georgian Children's Books," Children's Literature, vol. 14, ed. Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986], 31-59; and in "'A Taste for Truth and Realities': Early Advice to Mothers on Books for Girls," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 12, no. 3 [Fall 1987]: 118-24.) More recently and more perceptively, Gary Kelly has sought to account for the period's disapproval in terms of social and ideological tensions in the professional and upper-middle-class consumers of a genre "associated mainly with the values and culture of the aristocracy and gentry," the customary themes of which were "love, honour, intrigue, gallantry, and property." Clearly, gender needs to be factored into such a class analysis: women reformers characteristically express what I would call enlightened "bourgeois" attitudes in opposition to what Kelly identifies as the "decadent libertine aristocratic" ethos of much Georgian fiction, "'This Pestiferous Reading': The Social Basis of Reaction against the Novel in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain," Man and Nature 4 (1985): 184, 188. Documentary records of eighteenth-century reading, as opposed to the commentary of moralists and educational reformers, are scarce. For an overview and an account of one rather early example, see Jan Fergus, "Eighteenth-Century Readers in Provincial England: The Customers of Samuel Clay's Circulating Library and Bookshop in Warwick, 1770-72," Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 78, no. 2 (1984): 155-213. Although her work challenges some clichés, it verifies women's taste for fiction, and, as Austen's Henry Tilney points out in Northanger Abbey, men's as well. (Although this novel was not published until 1818, it satirizes authors and audiences of the 1790s, just as the 1811 publication date of Sense and Sensibility obscures its origins in the same period.) Sentimental narrative writing apparently gratified (probably in different ways) the fantasies of both sexes. The famous bookseller Lackington has much favorable to say about the new woman reader of novels, and contemporary historian Lawrence Stone argues for a correlation between increased consumption of novels and the growth of marriage for love; see Memoirs of the Forty-five First Years of the Life of James Lackington, 13th ed. (London: James Lackington, [1791]), esp. pp. 263-66; and The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 283-87. For a much more casual survey of eighteenth-century readership and circulating libraries than Fergus's, see Devendra P. Varma, The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge (Washington, D.C.: Consortium Press, 1972). J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800, 1932 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Bison Books, 1961), remains the best overview of the period's fiction. For more recent criticism, see Roger D. Lund, "The Modern Reader and the 'Truly Feminine Novel,' 1660-1815: A Critical Reading List," Fetter 'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 398-425. Lund'stitle is from one of MW's reviews.

⁵Collected Letters, p. 263.

⁶ Although I do not have space here to rehearse the evidence for MW's contributions, this essay is based on a thorough investigation begun in 1976. For considerations, see Ralph M. Wardle's pioneering article, "Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer," PMLA 62, no. 4 (December 1947): 1000-9, and biography, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography, 1951 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Bison Books, 1966); Derek Roper's "Mary Wollstonecraft's Reviews," Notes and Queries n.s. 5 (January 1958): 37-38, and Reviewing before the "Edinburgh," 1788-1802 (London: Methuen, 1978); Eleanor Flexner's Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1972), Appendix D, pp. 273-74; and Sally N. Stewart's essay, "Mary Wollstonecraft's Contributions to the Analytical Review," Essays in Literature 11, no. 2 (Fall 1984): 187-99, and dissertation (as Sally Stewart Forrer), "The Literary Criticism of Mary Wollstonecraft" (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1979). Mixing external evidence with stylistic and content analysis, Wardle argues that MW 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.) Most of MW's reviews are very short and, in keeping with common practice of the time, would probably have been sent to the printer on a single sheet signed at the end. Key evidence is that the M, W, and T signatures disappear while MW was abroad; after returning from France she picks up only the M. Working independently from unpublished papers, Elbridge Colby, the biographer of Thomas Holcroft, MW's fellow liberal, also identifies T, M, and unsigned reviews followed by M reviews as MW's work in his edition of The Life of Thomas Holcroft, 1925, 2 vols. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968). Roper's 1958 note severely criticizes Wardle's hypothesis, citing a 1796 review of The Monk, which he argues is not as moral as expected from MW. In 1961, however, this review (with three others, all signed only at the end) was identified by Eleanor L. Nicholes from manuscript as MW's work, "SC 15," Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 152-57. Roper also questions attributions that would give MW 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). Certain reviewers covered certain areas. (MW considered boxing from a humanitarian angle.) Finally, Roper insists that truly anonymous material was part of the AR, as evidenced by unsigned final notices, but these are normally the abstracts from foreign periodicals, which were a special feature of the AR.Roper's more recent book runs to the opposite extreme, attributing to MW (p. 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 MW was still very much romantically entangled with Gilbert Imlay and not reviewing. DM (and MD, its variant) are clearly the insignia of another reviewer. Flexner's appendix is not helpful; she cannot have examined the reviews closely, because the October 1790 review she considers doubtful is not signed W as she says, but M, and is full of characteristic Wollstonecraftisms.

The most thorough published study is Stewart's. She points out some, but far less than all of the parallels between the M, W, and T reviews, indicating that these are indeed by the same person. In addition to very close stylistic echoes and content parallels, these reviews also contain frequent internal cross references, contextual evidence indicating that one person was writing under the three signatures. Still more persuasively, reviews associated with these initials not only sound like one another, but they also dovetail with the style and concerns of MW's known works. The runs of reviews signed only at the end also frequently refer to one another, indicating that they are by the same person; groups of reviews often function as a unit. A computer analysis would resolve all doubts, but the stylistic and content parallels are so marked that readers familiar with MW's work will recognize her hand even in unsigned early reviews. The AR's signature letters follow no single pattern, although some contributors (like Alexander Geddes) used their own initials; two-part reviews sometimes play with initials (0, OS; DM, MD). A hitherto unnoticed way to explain the T is that MW sometimes signs her name M Wt (e.g., Collected Letters, p. 210); she may have dropped the W and T after her return because she was primarily going under Gilbert Imlay's name, her usual signature then being 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): 293-94. (Collected Letters, p. 385, verifies that Wollstonecraft had indeed read Angelina.) Shortly thereafter MW had her final break with Imlay; Ml henceforth disappears and only M reviews continue until her death. These two reviews, however, are not stylistically distinctive enough to be conclusive.

Because most of MW's reviews are brief, even the longer ones being largely quotation, my references refer to the entire review.

⁷ The "forward-looking" Analytical, as Walter Graham points out, "encouraged … the romantic reaction in English literature," reflecting "the romantic or sentimental drift of literature during the 1790's better than any other periodical," English Literary Periodicals (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1930), pp. 221, 195, 220.Ironically, as the editor makes clear in the opening issue, the journal was intended originally to be just what its name implies—impartial, objective, devoid of idiosyncratic views, [Thomas Christie], "To the Public," Analytical Review I (May 1788): i-vi.

⁸ Cora Kaplan faults Wollstonecraft's "paradigm of women's psychic economy" because "only maternal feeling survives as a positively realized element of the passionate side of the Psyche," a somewhat inaccurate but very instructive assessment, "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism," Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 158.

⁹ Much recent work considers women and what happens when they read from a variety of perspectives; representative examples include Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming A Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (New York: Viking, 1982); Jonathan Culler, "Reading as a Woman," On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 43-64; Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978); and Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Culler's deconstruction of female experience as the ground of reading has provoked dissent from Nancy K. Miller, "Rereading as a Woman: The Body in Practice," The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 354-62; and Robert Scholes, "Reading Like a Man," Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 204-18.

¹⁰ "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1971)," Adrienne Rich's Poetry, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: W. W. Norton Critical Edition, 1975), pp. 90-91.

¹¹Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, 1788; 1798, ed. Gary Kelly (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), Mary, pp. 2-3; Advertisement; Maria, Author's Preface. Mary writes a long "rhapsody on sensibility," pp. 53-54; it is similarly rhapsodically defined in "The Cave of Fancy" written about the same time, "Extract of The Cave of Fancy: A Tale," Memoirs and Posthumous Works of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman", 2 vols. (Dublin: John Rice, 1798), 2: 241. What the author repeatedly terms Maria's "romantic" idealism is central to her character.

¹² Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson, "Theories of FeministCriticism: A Dialogue," Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory, ed. Josephine Donovan (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975). p. 64.

¹³Maria, Author's Preface; Mary, Advertisement; Review of An Excursion to Brighthelmstone, made in the Year 1789, by Henry Wigstead and Thomas Rowlandson, Analytical Review 8 (December 1790): 462 (T review). Commentators on Wollstonecraft's fictions agree on their uncertainties, but vary considerably in explicating their confusions. See, for example, Poovey; Marilyn Butler, "The Woman at the Window: Ann Radcliffe in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen," Gender and Literary Voice, ed. Janet Todd, Women and Literature n.s. 1 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), pp. 128-48; Mary Jacobus, "The Difference of View," Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), pp. 10-21, and "Reading Correspondences," Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 278-92; Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft (Boston: Twayne, 1984); Mitzi Myers, "Unfinished Business: Wollstonecraft's Maria," The Wordsworth Circle 11, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 107-14; Laurie Langbauer, "An Early Romance: Motherhood and Women's Writing in Mary Wollstonecraft's Novels," Romanticism and Feminism, pp. 208-19; and Janet Todd's "The Female Text—Edited," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century: Transactions of the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment 4 (1980): 1949-55, and "Reason and Sensibility in Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman," Frontiers. A Journal of Women Studies 5, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 17-20. Also helpful is Lynn Sukenick, "On Women and Fiction," The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 28-44.

¹⁴Collected Letters, pp. 178-79; Review of The Young Lady of Fortune; or, Her Lover Gained by a Strategem, 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): 464-65 (T is next signature); Review of Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake, by Charlotte Smith, Analytical Review 5 (December 1789): 484-86 (M is next signature).

¹⁵A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, 1792, ed. Charles W. Hagelman, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), p. 275. Kathleen McCormack argues that George Eliot's well-known essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (October 1856)"—Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 300-24—derives from her recent reading of the Rights (she especially marked this passage), "George Eliot: Wollstonecraft's 'Judicious Person with Some Turn for Humour,'" English Language Notes 19, no. 1 (September 1981): 44-46. Although Eliot was not familiar with MW's reviews, her essay shows many parallels because of the similar approach. For a relevant reassessment of the Wollstonecraft-Eliot relationship, see Nicholas McGuinn, "George Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft," The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World, ed. Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), pp. 188-205.

¹⁶ 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 The Child of Woe: A Novel, by Mrs. Elizabeth Norman, Analytical Review 3 (February 1789): 221-22 (W review); Review of A Day in Turkey; or, The Ruffian Slaves: A Comedy, by Mrs. Cowley, Analytical Review 13 (June 1792): 147-48 (W review).

¹⁷ Review of Euphemia, by Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, Analytical Review 8 (October 1790): 222-24 (T review); Review of Henrietta of Gerstenfeld: A German Story, Analytical Review 1 (June 1788): 209; Review of Agitation; or, The Memoirs of George Woodford and Lady Emma Melville, by the Author of The Ring and The False Friends, Analytical Review I (June 1788): 208 (first issues unsigned).

¹⁸ 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): 488-89 (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).

¹⁹ 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 & forceddifficulties, without striking merit of any kind," Jane Austen's Letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 180. For this Burney review, see Nicholes, Shelley and His Circle, 1:156.

²⁰ 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.

²¹ Review of The Child of Woe; Review of Emmeline, The Orphan of the Castle, by Charlotte Smith, Analytical Review I (July 1788): 327-33 (M review); Review of The Widow of Kent; or, The History of Mrs. Rowley, Analytical Review I (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). Commenting on the Werter fad, Wollstonecraft writes: "ladies are all so partial to the man, who could die for love, that it appears to be high treason against the laws of romance, to allow Charlotte to live, and bring young Alberts into the world:—true, tender hearted ladies—she ought to have ran mad, and died.—It was very indelicate to live to fulfil the duties of life!" Review of Miscellaneous Poems, by Anne Francis, Analytical Review 7 (July 1790): 299-301 (M is next signature). This review's contrast between passive romance and the active citizenship of maternal duty notably anticipates the Rights of Woman.

²² 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). Wollstonecraft's satire calls to mind not only Austen's juvenilia, but also her often cited epistolary observation: "pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked," Jane Austen's Letters, pp. 486-87. Austen's parodies of the sentimental school are reprinted in Minor Works, vol. 6 of The Works of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 1954 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).

²³ Review of Edward: Various Views of Human Nature, Taken from Life and Manners, Chiefly in England, by [John Moore], Analytical Review 24 (January 1797): 23-25 (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; Rights of Woman, p. 272.

²⁴ 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): 431-34 (T review); Review of The Negro Equalled by Few Europeans: Translated from the French, Analytical Review 7 (August 1790): 462-63 (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 qf Letters, by Alexander Bicknell, Analytical Review 4 (July 1789): 351 (W is next signature); Review of Emmeline; Review of Doncaster Races. For modern feminist analyses of women as romance readers that are in many ways analogous to MW's own ambivalence toward the novel of sensibility, see Ann Barr Snitow, "Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women Is Different," Radical History Review 20 (Spring-Summer 1979): 141-61; Kay Mussell, Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Romance Fiction (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1984); Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (Hamden, Ct.: Archon, 1982); Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Madonne M. Miner, Insatiable Appetites: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1984); and Carol Thurston, The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Depending on whether they align romance with patriarchal ideology or maternal paradigms, modern feminists view the genre negatively or positively, and I believe the same dualisms help explain MW's hostility toward debased romance and her use of romance forms in her own fiction.

²⁵ Emily W. Sunstein, A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 172; Roper, Reviewing before the "Edinburgh", p. 168; Review of Sketches of Society and Manners in Portugal, in A Series of Letters, by Arthur William Costigan, Analytical Review 1 (August 1788): 451-57 (W review); Samuel Johnson, "The Rambler No. 4, March 31, 1750," Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), pp. 60-69.

²⁶ Review of A Simple Story, by Mrs. [Elizabeth] Inchbald, Analytical Review 10 (May 1791): 101-3 (M is next signature). In her essay and dissertation on MW's reviews, Stewart (Forrer), following Wardle's early biography, tries to conceptualize MW's aesthetic as a movement from a didactic early orientation to an expressive position in "On Poetry," but MW was always a moral rather than a formalist critic, and parallels to "On Poetry" run through her very earliest reviews. Didactic and expressive modes instyle and content intertwine throughout her career; she is always antiimitation, pro-innovation, and always contrasts the affected and the authentic as standards of value. The best general statements of her position remain Eleanor L. Nicholes's, "Mary Wollstonecraft," Shelley and His Circle, 1: 51-55, 178); and MW's own apologia, Collected Letters, p. 345. For weakness as a central component of the sentimental code see R. W. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974); and Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986).

²⁷ Review of Celestina: A Novel, by Charlotte Smith, Analytical Review 10 (July 1791): 409-15 (M review); Review of Emmeline; Rights of Woman, p. 107.

²⁸ 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).

²⁹Rights of Woman, pp. 105, 190, 108, 34, 105.

³⁰Rights of Woman, p. 190.

³¹ "Hints, Chiefly Designed to Have Been Incorporated in the Second Part of the Rights of Woman," Memoirs and Posthumous Works, 2: 272, 274, 271.

³² Review of Amusement: A Poetical Essay, by Henry James Pye, Analytical Review 6 (March 1790): 326-27 (M is next signature); Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 285; "On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature," Memoirs and Posthumous Works, 2: 255, 254, 260, 256, 264. This material was originally published as "On Artificial Taste," Monthly Magazine and British Register 3 (April 1797): 279-82, as a "Letter to the Editor" signed W.Q.

³³ Review of Anna St. Ives: A Novel, by Thomas Holcroft, Analytical Review 13 (May 1792): 72-76 (M review); Rights of Woman, pp. 34-35; Review of Earl Goodwin: An Historical Play, by Ann Yearsley, Analytical Review 11 (December 1791): 427-28 (M review); "On Poetry," Memoirs and Posthumous Works, 2: 256.

³⁴ Virtually everything MW wrote is stylistically distinctive; two examples (both from M reviews) illustrate the point: "Though several historical tales have been well received by the public, and, in some measure, deserve the reception they met with; yet, we cannot cordially approve of such productions as indirectly weaken the evidence of history, and by confounding truth and fiction in a regular story, mislead young people, who will afterwards, perhaps, find truth in its native dress insipid, or be unable to disentanglematters of fact from the adventitious ornaments that adorn them, or are interwoven so artfully into the very texture of the narration, that matured reason may afterwards vainly endeavour to efface the first lively impression made on the imagination," Review of Historic Tales: a Novel, Analytical Review 7 (May 1790): 100; "yet, a defence of Rousseau appears to us unnecessary—for surely he speaks to the heart, and whoever reading his works can doubt whether he wrote from it—had better take up some other book.… his most enthusiastic admirer must allow that his imagination was sometimes rampant, and breaking loose from his judgment, sketched some alluring pictures, whose colouring was more natural than chaste, yet over which, with the felicity of genius, he has thrown those voluptuous shades, that, by setting the fancy to work, prove a dangerous snare, when the hot blood dances in the veins," Review of Letters on the Confessions of J. J Rousseau, by M. Guigne, trans. from the French, Analytical Review 11 (Appendix 1790): 528. MW has been criticized for the supposed disorganization and awkwardness of her style (and for the seeming structural disorder of her work in general). Certainly her discursive, conjunctive style differs from the complexly subordinated linear style typical of the period. The latter lays out ideas already classified and arranged; MW's unpremeditated syntactic structure, in accordance with her ethos and aesthetic, mirrors the shifting perspective of the writer's mind, piling up clauses and phrases as they occur. Colloquial, fluid, exploratory, open-ended, immediate, less processed and controlled than standard style, it vividly embodies the subjectivity and the search after wholeness of an active mind. It is the formal analogue of her ideological position, its roughness testifying to the sincerity and artlessness she values. Although Poovey reads Wollstonecraft's style as victim of paternal ideology, much recent work aligns this style with a female rhetoric and aesthetic; see Josephine Donovan, "The Silence Is Broken," Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 205-18; Thomas J. Farrell, "The Female and Male Modes of Rhetoric," College English 40, no. 8 (April 1979): 909-21; Julia Penelope Stanley and Susan J. Wolfe (Robbins), "Towards a Feminist Aesthetic," Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women's Culture 6 (1978): 57-61; and 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): 1942-49; but much more feminist criticism is relevant as Nancy K. Miller's title—The Poetics of Gender—indicates, Gender and Culture Series, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). For an insightful analysis of Wollstonecraft's prose from another perspective, see Syndy Conger, "The Sentimental Logic of Wollstonecraft's Prose," Prose Studies 10, no. 2 (September 1987): 143-58.

³⁵ 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), pp. 159-63; and Jane Roland Martin, Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 70-102. MW herself was fond of observing that "reason and fancy are nearer akin than cold dulness is willing to allow," 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).

³⁶ 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; Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, p. 176; Review of Original Letters of the Late Mr. Laurence Sterne, Never Before Published, Analytical Review I (July 1788): 335 (W review).

³⁷ 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): 343-44 (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): 466-67 (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).

³⁸ 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, no. I (Fall 1980): 71; Rights of Woman, pp. 196, 147.