Andrew O. Winckles, Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: 'Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader'. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. x + 272. £90. ISBN 9781789620184.

Joseph Morrissey, Women's Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770-1820: Dangerous Occupations. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. 225. £79. ISBN 9783319703558.

Two new books by Andrew Winckles and Joseph Morrissey provide intriguing insights into the works of women writers during the Romantic era. Winckles offers a well-researched examination of the way Methodist evangelicalism altered the media through which women expressed themselves, while Morrissey focuses on how women used various forms of 'domestic activity' to control their environments and communicate their points of view. Scholars with interests in Romantic-era women will find the books illuminating individually but might want to consider reading them in tandem, since they complement one another well.

Winckles notices a paradoxical preference in Methodism for 'conservative central authority' despite the 'democratizing tendency' of the religious denomination (1). These two features worked together to foster an environment that encouraged women to seek alternative media for self-expression. As Winckles argues, Methodism 'fundamentally alter[ed] the conditions and terms of the structures of mediation' (3). Winckles provides an overview of Methodism and contemporary attitudes toward its practitioners, pointing out that many people associated Methodism and radical thought. For many writers of the time - especially women writers - this tendency led to a restriction of publication opportunities. However, Winckles demonstrates that women often actually preferred not to be published through traditional channels and, instead, circulated their work through oral narrative and through handwritten text in the form of documents such as letters, diaries, transcribed personal accounts, and commonplace books. As a result, these women writers were able to exert a significant level of control over the dissemination of their ideas - far greater than they would have been able had they chosen traditional publication through male-dominated print media. Paradoxically, however, the use of alternative media resulted in the relegation of many such works to obscurity since so many later scholars have tended to ignore these alternative methods of dissemination and since gaining access to such material is significantly more difficult than accessing traditional print media. In Winckles's view, the truth of Methodist women's writing must account for alternative media and must recognise texts produced through said media as literature. Dismissing these texts as irrelevant allows only a partial picture of Methodist women's writing.

Having established the context for discussion, Winckles moves into a consideration of 'how early Methodist women used the new media practices and protocols of evangelicalism to transmit and transform public life and literature by examining how their social networks used the space of mediation to develop a public voice' (13). He focuses on the 'unique discourse structures' fostered by the Methodist movement through various types of meetings held by its adherents and suggests a complicated interaction among oral, manuscript, and printed media that exerted lasting influence on the development of the novel and the literature of sensibility (25). Winckles argues that the influence of women's letter writing can be seen in the structures of early novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, and he suggests that various forms of life-writing helped many women writers, like Hester Ann Rogers and Mary Wollstonecraft, to encode female erotic desire in their texts in ways that promoted authorial control over the resulting literature. Winckles credits Methodist leader John Wesley with much of the acceptance women were able to attain in traditional print media and suggests that after Wesley's death, women writers' opportunities contracted in ways that prompted additional reliance on alternative media since Methodism became 'more centralized, more carefully controlled, more bureaucratic, and more male' (26). Using the examples of Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Mary Tooth, and Hannah More, Winckles suggests that even reputedly conservative women writers of the time chose to employ alternative media strategies for subversive purposes. Furthermore, writers like Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Tighe, and Maria Spilsbury were prompted to use alternative media - including, in Spilsbury's case, painting - to express their evangelical beliefs. Finally, Winckles considers the works of Agnes Bulmer and Felicia Hemans 'as theology' (27).

While the focus of Winckles's monograph is alternative media for Romantic-era women writers, Morrissey's interest lies in the domestic activities that women used for self-expression during the same period. As Morrissey summarises his argument, 'this book is an attempt to reconstruct Romantic-period women's domestic activity as human endeavours intimately related to the creation and expression of self, and as interventions into the web of human relations' (14). Morrissey brings a unique point of view to the study of Romantic-era women by emphasizing the 'human messiness and unpredictability' of domestic activity, which he sees as 'a function of fluctuating psychological processes and interpersonal relationships' (3). From Morrissey's standpoint, traditional examinations of domestic activity have tended to ignore the emotional expression that is inherent in the completion of such activity, and Morrissey's intent is to restore some of the connectedness between the two. Moreover, Morrissey is curious about the 'representation of the domestic act as it unfolds' (9). Essentially, Morrissey suggests that domestic activities like needlework and reading novels provided Romantic-era women with the means to express their emotions and consolidate interpersonal relationships. His immediate interest includes selected novels of Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, and Frances Burney.

After establishing the cultural milieu surrounding his discussion and providing a definition of his terms, Morrissey moves to examinations of specific literary works that help to illuminate the extent to which women writers presented various types of domestic activity in their writing as conduits for feminine agency. Morrissey turns first to authors Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen and their respective novels, The Old Manor House and Mansfield Park, interrogating the representation of major characters engaged in needlework. Although Morrissey frames the characters' needlework as an activity that fosters the creation and strengthening of interpersonal relationships, he suggests that, ultimately, the authors are unable to extricate themselves fully from existing 'misogynistic stereotypes' (11). Morrissey finds a more optimistic approach to domestic activity in Frances Burney's The Wanderer, in which music is presented as 'a vital source of human friendship' for women (12). In Austen's Northanger Abbey, Morrissey focuses on the act of reading as another domestic activity with far-reaching consequences for women. Specifically, he discusses reading as an 'aspect of psychological growth' and as a source of pleasure (12). He then turns to depictions of sensibility and sympathy in Smith's Ethelinde as ambiguously feminist and misogynistic. One of the strengths of Morrissey's argument is this acknowledgment of ambiguity in the domestic activities being discussed. While the activities provide women characters with means of self-expression and reification, the very fact that they occur in the domestic sphere tends to relegate them into secondary strata that suggest a reaffirmation of patriarchal misogyny. Morrissey rightly points out that the social constraints and pressures surrounding the domestic activities in question are far more complicated than they might seem at first glance and encourages readers to maintain a sceptical attitude that will keep them from oversimplifying the complex realities of women's expression.

Both these monographs provide substantive and unique approaches to women's writing in the Romantic era and make important contributions to the corpus of literary criticism related to the period. The only flaw in either book is that Morrissey's reads as if it were rushed into print without adequate editing, a defect that many readers will find consistently distracting. Regardless of any flaws in the texts, the two authors provide convincing arguments in favour of their ideas and admirably lead readers through lines of reasoning that are likely to inspire similar additional research. Scholars of Romantic-era women and their writings will find both books illuminating.

Ben P. Robertson, Troy University