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Humanities
Eleanor Ty.
University of Toronto Press. xiv, 224. $45.00
In Empowering the Feminine, Eleanor Ty provides a valuable service to scholars of women's literature by analysing eleven little-known works by Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie. Following up her earlier book on the radical writers of the 1790s (Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s 1993), Ty here addresses the latent or less obtrusive feminist themes of three conservative authors. She frames her study with the hostile reactions to Godwin's biography of Wollstonecraft on the one hand and a visionary statement by Mary Hays on the other, effectively demonstrating the discursive consequences for women who desired reform. Hence the strategies of representation she reveals are subtle and frequently confined within narratives that until now have been read as strictly patriarchal.
The most prevalent...