Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Grinnell library catalog page

This book contests critics such as J.M.S. Tompkins, Marilyn Butler, Gary Kelly, and Ian Watt who underestimate the literature of the 1790s. Johnson argues “that the fiction of the 1790s is a commanding, imaginative response to a world riven with crisis” (2). To support this assertion, Johnson connects feminist literary history to politics. The book addresses Edmund Burke’s writings including Reflections on the Revolution in France and his contemporaries’ reactions to his work. Additionally, Johnson addresses Richard Polwhele’s late eighteenth-century work The Unsex’d Females which links a devious sexuality to heterodoxal women writers.

Johnson organizes her book into three parts addressing Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, and Frances Burney, respectively, with an afterword discussing Jane Austen’s work. Each chapter focuses on major works of these authors including Wollstonecraft’s Vindications of the Rights of Woman, and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian, Burney’s Camilla, and The Wanderer, and Austen’s Emma. The chapters focus on these works but also address other, lesser known texts by these women as well as other works of the 1790s, including those by William Godwin and Matthew Gregory Lewis among others.

Johnson argues, “in maintaining that the welfare of the nation and the tearfulness of private citizens – actual as well as fictional – were understood in the 1790s to be urgently interconnected, my aim in the following pages is to open feminist literary history out to politics, rather than to advance a Foucauldian claim about the more covert dissemination of powers” (2).

Entered by Betsey on 13 July 2004 at 2:21 PM.