Eleanor Ty. Empowering the Feminine: the Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-01

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Pp. 236. $45.00.

The last two decades have seen a revival of interest in nineteenth-century studies in women writers who had been dismissed and forgotten during prior critical and theoretical discussions on canonical concerns and writers who fit them. Although we still cannot agree in how to think about these women writers--are they minor, are they second and third tier, or do they redefine the canon?--two pieces of the history of their recovery are not under dispute. The first is that this recovery is due to the earlier intervention of feminist criticism and theory in literary studies, an intervention that asked severe questions of both current practice and the new critical theories concerning who we read and why. The second is that it has taken twenty-five years of feminist critical struggle to make an impact on how we read and why. Again indisputable, the combination of the work of the last fifteen years in recovering nineteenth-century women writers, and the work of the last ten years reconciling feminist and other theoretical approaches with the reality of those recovered writers, has begun to produce substantive changes in the discipline.

For some time now we have seen the reissuing of women's texts, of individual works and of editions of single writers; but, finally, we are beginning to see serious efforts to make the cross-currents between these writers intelligible in terms of their cultural and literary contexts rather than in terms of received history and a male canon. Eleanor Ty's Empowering the Feminine, a study of three very different women writers, is just such a study, and one of a new generation of critical projects that go beyond sweeping surveys or single author studies. In this, Ty continues the work she began in Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto, 1993), joining it...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.