Lisa Wood. Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0838755275. Price: US$39.50.

The feminist discourse of the late eighteenth century has been identified by critics as both politically and socially intrusive on the domesticity of the revolutionary age. While more attention has been garnered by the radical women writers of this period, Lisa Wood focuses on the conservative element of women writers as a worthy addition to the literary canon. In her text Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution, Wood investigates conservative feminine (not feminist) writing that enlarges the body of eighteenth-century feminist writing to show how the traditional values of women intersect with an emerging feminist discourse that both transgresses and supports these values. The didactic-novel form explored in this study serves a dual purpose, a review of an unpopular genre of literature with the radical female writer and, perhaps even more poignantly, an understanding of the conservative nature of those female writers advocating the conservative politics of church and state. Beginning with the 1790s Wood’s analysis crosses genres and decades in order to represent the diversity of the antirevolutionary novel in form and style as well as to reconfigure its relationship to the revolutionary writings of this period. Although at times repetitious in her attempt to isolate didacticism in the history and literature of these times from its revolutionary counterparts, Wood effectively highlights the less attractive but central ideology of moral literature. Consequently, a new perspective emerges on moral literature as an established and respected literary genre that can now be classified as a form of feminist discourse assisting the reader to situate the rise of revolutionary feminist writing in relationship to a broader context of politics, religion, and social convention. While she carefully explains her application of the terms antirevolutionary, counterrevolutionary, and conservative as descriptions of political activism, Wood prepares the reader to accept that the conservative women writers undertaken in her study were not openly displaying their political intentions. Instead, these writers intended to develop conduct and moral literature as a respectable genre that identified women in middle-class and aristocratic households as females who not only embraced values of propriety in their moral lives but also demonstrated reliable and dependable thinking in their intellectual lives. Wood emphasizes that the authority of the female voice was based on trustworthiness not from an oppositional perspective but from one that achieved its respectability through an adherence to conforming ideologies. Borrowing from a medical view of the diseased body in need of an antidote, Wood carefully draws her analogy of the novel form as a literary embodiment of a sick or healthy ideology. The healthy novel provides the reader with an antidote to the poisonous novel which portrays women as politically radical thinkers and immoral creatures. The reader can then attach herself to the moral comfort of the text in order to repel the vile contents of revolutionary sentiments. Wood’s purpose is not to pass moral judgment on the nature of this genre but to present the less told story merely because it is less appealing, unexciting, and even bordering on the mundane, in contrast with the passionate rhetoric of a revolutionary ideology. She points out that “antirevolutionary novels appear insubstantial by post-Romantic standards” (75) and have been overlooked by critics in their substantial importance to the revolutionary age. Wood’s study explores didactic women writers such as Jane West, Laetitia Matilda Hawkins, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Hannah More who are juxtaposed against revolutionary women writers such as Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonecraft as well as the political polemics of William Godwin and Tom Paine. What is particularly insightful about this exploration is how Wood …