Jonathan Wordsworth, The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age. Poole: Woodstock, 1997. ISBN: 1-85477-212-0. Price: £35 (US$65.00).

Jonathan Wordsworth's volume of scholarly essays, The Bright Work Grows: Women Writers of the Romantic Age, encompasses an impressive range of literature by women of the period and includes the work of female pamphleteers, essayists, novelists, and poets. Wordsworth's eloquent and learned style will be familiar to those already acquainted with his previous two volumes in the Revolution and Romanticism Woodstock Facsimile Series: Ancestral Voices and Visionary Gleam. On the whole, these earlier volumes sought to chart the contours of the Romantic era through lesser-known works written by major literary figures of the time. In The Bright Work Grows, Wordsworth focuses on how both literary works by Romantic women writers attested to a revolution in attitudes towards women and how women's literary works were instrumental in defining the changes that took place in conventional political and social views. Wordsworth's lucid introduction outlines the political, social, commercial, and personal circumstances affecting female literary production in the Romantic Period. He observes that 'unquestionably…women had a tougher time' than their male contemporaries, but notes that 'being female' was not a draw back 'in terms of publication' as 'throughout the period, publishers were happy to print work by women.' What made the lives of women writers more difficult were the domestic trials of 'pregnancy, children, [and] looking after houses and husbands' and their precarious legal position, which required a married woman to surrender 'her property, and legal identity, to her husband' until The Married Women's Property Act 1870. These personal and public difficulties did not become, according to Wordsworth, the explicit preoccupation of female literature in the 1780's and 1790's. Even before the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), other women writers recognised education as an important topic, asserting that '[h]umanity as a whole can make progress only if women, as the natural educators of future generations, receive an appropriate education themselves.' Wordsworth understands Wollstonecraft's Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), written in 'the form of a manual', as endeavouring to address the issue of education on a practical level. The title of her reflections on the necessity of female education, Wordsworth reminds us, echoes John Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), which had 'ignored the existence of girls'—an oversight that Wollstonecraft desired to redress. Wordsworth's intelligent account of Wollstonecraft locates her in both the literary tradition of her own day and the intellectual context of John Locke and Edmund Burke. Wordsworth deals sensitively with the double bind in which Wollstonecraft found herself as an educated female and as an impoverished writer, whose upbringing had reinforced her own expectations of marriage. Unsurprisingly, her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters construed of 'education in terms of marriage' and had not yet developed 'the more cutting tones of the second Vindication'. Elsewhere in this illuminating volume, Wordsworth is eager to emphasise that it was Wollstonecraft's first Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), rather the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), 'that made her reputation.' Wordsworth considers 'The Rights of Men [as] a polemic, and not a political blueprint', comparing her tone to William Goldsmith or the 'young Wordsworth of Descriptive Sketches (1793), when she envisions a smiling landscape of the future'. Wollstonecraft's 'sense of the disastrous current situation' made it 'impossible for [her] to stay on the level of practical suggestion' in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which became a polemic 'against contemporary society.' Such debates about the education of an individual are inextricable, in Wordsworth's view, from 'the larger political concerns of improving society' and so education becomes 'the …