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Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journalPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20

Devoney Looser. WomenWriters and Old Age in GreatBritain, 1750–1850KATHERINE SINGER aa Mount Holyoke College , South HadleyPublished online: 19 Apr 2011.

To cite this article: KATHERINE SINGER (2011) Devoney Looser. Women Writers andOld Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 , Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal,40:4, 542-546, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2011.561720

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2011.561720

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Women’s Studies, 40:542–546, 2011Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00497878.2011.561720

BOOK REVIEW

Devoney Looser. Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain,1750–1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008.

BY KATHERINE SINGER

Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley

After thirty years or so of scholarly study on Romantic-periodwomen writers, it is surprisingly novel to think of an earlyCatherine Macaulay, a middle Felicia Hemans, or a late AnnaBarbauld. Ushered in by a scholar whose previous book, BritishWomen Writers and the Writing of History, gave the field a rich tasteof theorizing history and women writers, this view that womenhad distinct professional periods has been a long time coming.Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain deftlystrings together narratives of women’s writing lives that fashionmore nuanced chronicles of their lengthy and complex oeuvres.Looser brings into sharp focus the late stages, thinking throughthe complex set of challenges authors faced during old age. Indoing so, her study adds another hefty category of interpreta-tion to our recent models of gender and authorship, one that willsurely help us flesh out more acute patterns of female authorshipand startling paradigms of literary activity.

In a field that sometimes tends to dwell on authors whodied young or whose literary genius ebbed early, this approachis appealing for its sensitivity to what kinds of writing or aes-thetic projects might appeal to more mature writers. Attention tothis particular cross-section allows Looser to present individual-ized studies of how Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, CatharineMacauly, Hester Piozzi, Jane Austen, Anna Barbauld, and JanePorter thought of themselves as older women and elder writers.Because the notion of a wise dame of the pen was not a rolethat the public sphere honored at large, each of these diversewomen played with various strategies to continue building theircareers and stave off ageism that, Looser argues, was worse for

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Book Review 543

women writers. What she begins in this book—and calls for in herconclusion—is a taxonomy of the wise women and literary god-mothers that Elizabeth Barrett Browning felt so bereft of in the1840s (3).

Each of the seven histories constructed during the courseof the book identifies different choices women made based ontheir individual genres, politics, and previous literary reputations,so much so that it is almost difficult to make generalizationsabout them. This tension between our own feminist categoriesand our views of individual authors has the initial benefit of sus-pending any easy analyses about Romantic-era gender we mighttend to make. On the whole, however, we slowly form an impres-sion of those women who successfully engaged the literary publicwith their reputations intact and those who suffered at the handsof reviewers such as Francis Jeffrey and John Wilson Crocker.Edgeworth, Looser argues, was lauded for her depictions of con-ventional Victorian feminine women and spinsters who wererepentant for earlier transgressions, and Austen often upheld oldmaid stereotypes as well. Burney, on the other hand, receivedharsh strictures for her final novel, The Wanderer , what Crockercalled “Evelina grown old,” as he rankled at an older womanwriting romance (38). Macaulay and Porter, the biggest losershere, became Cassandra-like figures who foresaw the demise oftheir posthumous literary reputations and yet failed to preventthat very fate. Finally, although Piozzi foundered with the public,Looser suggests that she succeeded with a private audience of oneby executing the Johnsonian tutelage of actor William AugustusConway. Accordingly, one conclusion we might draw from theseclosely researched and sculpted accounts is that the success orfailure of a work or of a reputation is not necessarily easy to pre-dict by any single analysis of age, gender, genre, skill, or politicalaffiliation.

Together these individual literary histories emphasize someintricate if not fresh reasons for these writers’ disappearance frompublic reading lists. Looser suggests that while Edgeworth was ini-tially successful in portraying the Victorian feminine ideal, thispopular conservative stance ironically ensured that male criticscould ghettoize her novels as feminine and then forget aboutthem. Alternately, Porter’s ambition to buy back her copyrightsfrom Richard Bentley and to republish her novels with George

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544 Katherine Singer

Virtue including additional prefaces and postscripts amounted toa project in exhorting readers not to lose sight of her. Once again,this move paradoxically may have encouraged the public to dojust that. These accounts have the benefit of revealing how womenactively attempted to boost their posthumous fame and often inad-vertently experimented with tactics that had the reverse effect.Through these sometimes risky gambits, they seemed to under-stand that literary value was itself determined by the spirit of theage.

Part of the strength of Looser’s analysis depends upon herskillful portrayal of old age. Her readings uncover how women sawthrough common stereotypes of the querulous, gossipy, empty-headed old maid both in their own lives and their literary rep-resentations. A view of any writer’s old age is always more thansimply biological, and the chapter on unmarried Austen is a goodcase and point. Emma’s unforgettable Miss Bates, Looser argues,replays the stereotypical figures of old maidism, even thoughAusten seemed to spurn similar characterizations in her own life.This paradox quite importantly reveals how often fictional rendi-tions of women do not always or easily mimic authors’ biographies.Not only does this example remind us, as Looser says, “there aremany ways to be an old maid writer as to be an old woman writerin the period” (77), but it suggests that perhaps women refusedto think of themselves as old, even if their contemporaries did.To take this point a bit further, Looser couches her methodol-ogy in the delicate interweaving of “lives, careers, writings, andreceptions” (7). One wonders, however, what the study of women’swriting would look like if there were a bit less lives and morewriting—or at the very least, more readings against the grain ofbiography.

In several chapters, Looser touches on another conventionalimage, the old of “Age” or the politically out of touch author.Accordingly, Burney’s failures with her final, gargantuan novel TheWanderer should be viewed as an error of espousing revolution-ary zeal or valuing older women who do. Even more strikingly,Looser revises the great debates about the reception of Barbauld’s“Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” suggesting that the writer’s agewas just as much to blame as her politics or gender. Much moremight have been made about this connection between a woman’sage and her resistance or compliance to public political opinion.

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Book Review 545

Could younger women writers be seen as elderly if fallen out oftouch? The book’s brief discussions leave open approaches forfuture scholars to follow, considering age in terms of a writer’srelation to more ideological indicators such as political zeitgeist.

In her conclusion, Looser calls for a more complex analysisof women’s political stances, suggesting research that necessar-ily moves beyond old age to consider different phases of politicalaffiliation as well as changing, contradictory, and counter-intuitivealliances. Similarly, Looser recommends additional research onold age, gender, and genre, and a more voracious menu ofresearch should include a general study of women’s relationshipsto genre and form—certainly in old age but also throughout theircareers. It may be significant that all but one of Looser’s subjectswrote prose, and it is difficult not to wonder how poets such asCharlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Felicia Hemans might fitinto Looser’s schema. Perhaps we have enough literary history tocobble together, for example, what would be Smith’s sympatheticold maid plea for income and retribution for years contesting herfather-in-law’s will. Yet all three writers abstracted, theorized, ormeditated on the Romantic contraries of renovating nostalgia andvisionary futurity, and more work should be done on what Looser’sretrospective women might have to say about these more abstractideas of time, age, and memory.

In the end, whether battling the critics or choosing a pettopic, maven writers certainly crafted some intrepid writing prac-tices. Perhaps the book’s most pleasurable aspect is its concreteinsights into these late-life projects. Barbauld’s editing has longbeen overlooked as an important scholarly and writerly aspiration.Looser clearly demonstrates how Barbauld’s interest in codify-ing other writers served her ambition to promote certain literaryvalues, including those that would, in the future, ratify her ownwork. Similarly, Macaulay’s philosophizing in her last work, Letterson Education (1790), may explain her fading literary star, but italso reminds us that much remains to be said about the manywomen who took up the discursive, philosophical gauntlet in theirworks. Finally, Piozzi shines as a self-styled font of informal, bel-letristic, or oral knowledge. Whether viewed as ancillary activitiesto the writing process or writing subjectivities, these roles of edi-tor, philosopher, and sage display just how broad a canvas eruditewomen had on which to paint themselves.

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546 Katherine Singer

With these types of literary pursuit in mind, Looser surelypoints the way toward the next phase of women’s literary his-tory. That we might think of women as choosing these activities,which once might have been easily and quickly categorized as“masculine,” and that we can see women planning for their ownposthumous places without assuming themselves doomed as liter-ary wallflowers marks just how far we have come in the study ofwomen’s writing in the Romantic century.

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