About Clarke, The Rise
In the early years of the eighteenth century, the pioneer Anglo-Saxonist Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756), had begun to develop a project - a history of intellectual women. Norma Clarke tells us that "She had made a list in a notebook of some forty learned women: queens, aristocratic ladies and nuns for the most part, but also including the poet Katherine Philips, and Samuel Pepys's wife, Elizabeth. The notebook survives, and though the entries in it are brief it is clear that the plan was an ambitious one". Elstob's idea was lost when the death of her brother in 1715 left her destitute and she was forced into hiding to avoid her creditors. Although she later became a schoolmistress, and the governess to an aristocratic family, she never again had the time or the leisure for sustained scholarly work. We can only speculate as to what she could have produced, had her circumstances been different.
Like Elstob's abandoned project, Norma Clarke's history of British intellectual women in the eighteenth century is composed of brief entries - writers are given short sections or chapters - and an ambitious overall plan. It is a populous, bustling, amiable book, which sets out "to make available for a general readership some of the exciting developments in scholarship of the period".
Clarke's engagingly conversational style and her liberal inclusion of anecdotes and literary gossip make The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters a pleasure to read, and one can only applaud such a wholehearted attempt to create a new audience for eighteenth-century literature. Its official line seems to be the well-worn one that women writers were freer in the early part of the eighteenth century to write in any area or genre, including philosophy, and to consort and correspond with male intellectuals in straightforward debate. By the mid- eighteenth century this was becoming more difficult to do as the social landscape heaved and changed; by the late century, a conservative recoil from the French Revolution swept away much that had been won, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the construction of what Mary Poovey has termed "the proper lady" resulted in a coerced self-censorship for literary women. This is a familiar narrative of decline, and it is the one to which Clarke obediently returns in her conclusion, despite her avowed eschewal of "gross oversimplifications".
What is interesting and thought-provoking about Clarke's book is its very failure to support its explicit thesis. Although it aims to follow "a chronology which locates a 'rise' for the woman of letters in the late seventeenth century and a 'fall' in the late eighteenth", it is written at a breakneck pace, and makes some switches from the eighteenth to the seventeenth century, and then a sudden fast-forward to Virginia Woolf and A Room of One's Own, around Chapter Four. For reasons that are not only to do with cutting and pasting (although a fair amount of this seems to have taken place), these women refuse to march in serried ranks from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, undergoing the correct chastisements at the appointed times.
Instead, their history is a series of continuous small individual rises and falls, and occasional resurrections. Writers enter, leave and then reappear several hundred pages later, and a history that is as much spatial as temporal emerges. Where they were, as much as when they were there, was important to the development of their scholarly activities. The challenge to teleological orthodoxy plays strangely against Clarke's constant supply of confusingly contradictory reasons why women both were, and were not, respected as intellectuals at any given moment.
All this invites reflection. Perhaps in the excitement generated by the recent scholarship which has restored these "lost" women to visibility, we have fallen into the trap of looking at them both too hard and not hard enough. Too hard, because what becomes clear here is that some of these women were probably not, in their own time, conspicuous for being female. Clarke herself says, of the successful playwright Susanna Centlivre (1667-1723), "it is hard to see how her own times 'discountenanced' her: she was an immensely popular playwright whose works had gone on being performed". Not hard enough, because what is also strikingly clear from Clarke's account is that these may all be women, but there the resemblance ends. So Aphra Behn (1640-89), for example, may have been "spiritually at home inside a royalist tradition of educated ladies, sexual openness, and the political power of wives, mistresses and mothers".
But another royalist writer, Jane Barker (1652-1732), reacted very differently to this "tradition". The diversity is difficult to handle in a general compendium such as this. Issues of social rank, regionality, religion, political allegiance, levels of immersion in polite culture and so on are touched on but never really become part of the argument. Often there is the sense that restoring a woman writer to visibility brings with it all sorts of other refocusings - reminding us just how complicated it is to reconstruct the "culture" of a particular place and time. One generalization that does seem to hold up is that women writers have not had the same purchase on posterity as their male colleagues. Clarke reminds us that "There was no Essay on the Writings and Genius of Delarivier Manley to match Joseph Warton's book on Pope, nor a Life of Jane Barker that preserved an account of her adventures in the world (and glamorized it) as Johnson's Life of Savage did for Richard Savage".
The greatest strength of The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters is in Clarke's vivid portrayal of the personal lives of her subjects and her stress on the importance of conversation and friendship in their intellectual lives. Clarke documents friendships between women, and with men, both amorous and platonic, while she admits frankly to the difficulty of assessing such ephemeral evidence from the past. At one point, she quotes Dr Johnson's warning that "Lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever". This book mourns much that is lost to posterity - from Clare Reeve's lost novel, left on the Ipswich to London coach, to Elizabeth Elstob's unwritten history - but what does remain, the essays, plays, poems, tracts and novels that these women did manage to write, seems also to be oddly mislaid in an account that avoids any close literary engagement. Clarke is right when she says, "women's relationship to the development of a national canon . . . is both longer and more complex than is generally understood". But if we are to assess this relationship more clear-sightedly, it must surely be by looking at the actual work these women produced, both for its merits, and in the context of the work of their male peers.
Norma Clarke delights the general reader with stories like that of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's commode, which she had painted with the backs of books by Pope, Swift and Bolingbroke so that she could have "the satisfaction of shitting on them every day", but that same reader might be left wondering if she herself wrote anything worth remembering. She did, and so did many of the women featured here. One can only hope that this amusing and lively book will encourage its readers to find out what it was.