Empowering the feminine : the narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 / Eleanor Ty.

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Ty examines three late 18th century female authors coming from different social backgrounds but all grappling with a desire for female empowerment to show how supposed female weaknesses were portrayed as potentially active forces for social change.

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CHOICE Review

Interest in the fiction produced by women in Britain during the period of its wars with revolutionary and imperial France has greatly increased since the groundbreaking and indispensable work of Marilyn Butler (Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, CH, Mar'76) and Gary Kelly (Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1993). Ty (Wilfrid Laurier Univ.), author of a study of five Jacobin novelists (Unsex'd Revolutionaries, CH, Mar'94), here addresses the construction of femininity in three women novelists of less radical tendency. Ty reads her texts through modern lenses--Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigarary--sometimes to illuminating effect (especially in her readings of Robinson), but equally often at the expense of carefully nuanced history (for instance, this reviewer was disappointed to find the complex late-18th-century terms "sense" and "sensibility" reduced to masculine reason and the "abjected other" of feminine passion--precisely the false binary that Jane West, and Jane Austen for that matter, argue against). Although this is a book for historical specialists (who else reads West and Opie?), those very specialists are the readers most likely to be put off by its insufficiently historical critical approach. D. L. Patey; Smith College