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The Celebrated Elizabeth Smith: Crafting Genius and Transatlantic Fame in the Romantic Era by Lucia McMahon (review)

2024; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jer.2024.a922065

1553-0620

Sarah J. Purcell,

Australian History and Society

Reviewed by: The Celebrated Elizabeth Smith: Crafting Genius and Transatlantic Fame in the Romantic Era by Lucia McMahon Sarah J. Purcell (bio) Keywords Elizabeth Smith, Romanticism, Gender, Feminity, Women's history The Celebrated Elizabeth Smith: Crafting Genius and Transatlantic Fame in the Romantic Era. By Lucia McMahon. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. 362. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $37.50). In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir published an essay in Vogue magazine entitled "Femininity: The Trap" that rejected the notion of the "eternal feminine" and took stock of changing historical circumstances that might propel women to greater equality and achievement in the future. Beauvoir wrote that, historically, parental influences, education, and internalized inferiority led women away from intellectual accomplishment and posited that "one can explain why women have rarely up to now achieved what is called genius. . . . Education—the whole world, in fact—teaches women timidity."1 Lucia McMahon's inventive new book about the British writer and adventurer Elizabeth Smith pushes even beyond Beauvoir's observation about the gendered nature of genius to trouble the whole category itself. In The Celebrated Elizabeth Smith, Lucia McMahon has given us a startling portrait of a woman from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century who was far from timid—climbing mountains; seeking education and producing scholarship in languages, literature, and philosophy; and pursuing literary and life connections with other learned women—and yet who also embraced some aspects of the restrictive femininity of her society. Elizabeth Smith's fame in her lifetime was limited by duty to family and piety, a reticence toward publicity and publication, and concerns about the limits of her own erudition. Lucia McMahon uses Smith's life story, and her afterlife as a literary figure whose posthumous fame grew and grew until it faded in the twentieth century, to illuminate female social networks and several generations of female intellectual achievement. Part I of the book examines the life of Elizabeth Smith (1776–1806), who, with little formal education, learned seven languages; studied science, literature, and history; prepared biblical translations from the original Hebrew; translated the correspondence of German writers Frederick and Margaret Klopstock; and wrote prose and poetry in her correspondence [End Page 148] with a large group of intelligent female friends. Smith, who moved frequently because of changes in the fortune of her northeast English parents, also "rambled through scenic landscapes, explored historic ruins, and literally climbed mountains," as she lived in and traveled to some of the most picturesque British places: the Lake District, Bath, Wales, and Ireland (5). Although she never published much in her lifetime and she sometimes doubted both her own intellect and the propriety of "polite" women appearing in print, Smith appeared as a marginal character in some notable Romantic writings, most notably Thomas Wilkinson's account of climbing Snowdon, Wales's highest peak, which Smith also summited. Notably, Smith also built a strong network of women friends and companions, including Harriet Bowlder, Isabella King, and Mary Hunt. In Part II, McMahon examines how Smith's "literary afterlife" brought her "posthumous fame across transatlantic cultures of print," first when her writings were published in Britain, and then when they spread, becoming much admired by women in the United States (7). Harriet Bowl-der, best known for her work on popular abridged editions of Shakespeare, edited posthumous editions of Smith's writing, framed as a tribute to her friend who had been too modest to allow such publication in her lifetime. Bowlder's Fragments, in Prose and Verse; by Miss Elizabeth Smith, Lately Deceased, With Some Account of Her Life and Character became popular throughout Britian and especially in the United States, where it was frequently reprinted and excerpted in the century after it originally appeared in 1808. Some of Smith's other works, including her edition of Klopstock letters, were also published to great acclaim. Literary magazines and male writers frequently praised Smith's work, although they often also used Smith's "exceptional" example "to reiterate gendered constructions" that reinforced ideas of general feminine intellectual limitation (185). Simultaneously, however, McMahon shows how generations of women readers found inspiration and intellectual spark in Smith's writings. McMahon's historical skills bring Smith...