Both of these books are on 'women's subjects'. That is to say, they deal with the major arrangements of a society in its (usually uneasy) dispositions of property and power, including control over reproduction. Elizabeth Bergen Brophy's book is a response to the question which must have occurred to every reader of 18th-century novels: 'Are the novels really at all like life at the time?' Were there 'real life' counterparts to Clarissa Harlowe and Sophia Western - and to the other ladies, old and young, married, widowed or single, who turn up in the pages of 18th-century novels? Brophy has undertaken an impressive labour in reading a couple of hundred separate (and often, one gathers, large) manuscript sources, collections of journals and letters by various women who lived between the late 17th and the early 19th centuries. She has also consulted the substantial number of such collections already published. Her strategy is to lay side by side the accounts of women's lives in the novels and the accounts emanating from the women themselves.

LRB 9 January 1992 | PDF Download