Unsex'd revolutionaries : five women novelists of the 1790s / Eleanor Ty.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Using historical and feminist psycho-linguistic studies as a base, Ty explores some of the complexities encountered in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith

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CHOICE Review

This study, like Ruth Salvaggio's Enlightened Absence (CH, Oct'89), is an example of what Gayatri Spivak might call "essentialist, humanist, deconstructivist feminism." Working back and forth between French feminist theory and studies of women's psycho-sexual development by Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, Ty discovers many correspondences between these recent feminist findings of women's linguistic and psychic differences from men and the probing fictions of 1790s British women writers. This decade is rich in female novelistic experiments, and an investigation, like the present one of novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith, is certainly needed. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether they find Ty's rather heavy-handed interpretive apparatus illuminating or obfuscatory. The best chapter analyzes Inchbald's A Simple Story, a novel that might have been designed to illustrate Ty's argument about the Law of the Father. One can regret that the book as a whole reads more like a series of commentaries on selected novels than a well-integrated study of women's literary production in the period, and that the individual readings in general bring so little news. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty.