Bradford Keyes Mudge. Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays.

Hall, Donald E.

Bradford Keyes Mudge. Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1989.

All too often, critical studies that examine neglected or forgotten writers degenerate into simplistic attempts to prove that the artist in question was, in fact, a "genius" whose talent was fully realized but whose works have been undervalued or misunderstood. Such is invariably the case in some of the essays contained in the collections of literary biographies, where essayists often seem to feel that they must demonstrate the profundity of even the most hackneyed writers. On the other hand, one occasionally finds a study of an unknown or marginal figure that succeeds in revising the reader's conception of literary history, not by arguing for the inclusion of a particular author on a list of "great thinkers," but by illuminating the processes through which culture and criticism construct "difference" and by exploring the forces that might limit the expression of an individual's talent. This potential is richly fulfilled in Bradford Keyes Mudge's Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, a work that examines the career of a virtually unknown Victorian essayist who actively struggled against oppressive gender conceptions limiting the Victorian woman's right to speak and be heard. But Mudge's study does not simply attempt to recover a voice lost among those of better known writers, it also explores how another voice, that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was reconstructed posthumously by his daughter, whose critical and editorial "service" actually allowed her to create a space for herself in Victorian intellectual society.

Mudge's book "is at once a biography, a critical study, and a selected edition of essays" (x). Without a doubt, Sara Coleridge's social life was itself interesting enough to warrant close attention; she lived daily in the company of some of the most brilliant and widely read intellectuals of the nineteenth century, including Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Carlyle, and Macaulay. But as Mudge points out, it is all too common a mistake to evaluate Sara Coleridge's importance in literary history simply in terms of her relationships with such men. Sara Coleridge was also a writer who produced a small but significant body of work that insightfully addresses topics such as Victorian gender roles and intervenes into philosophical debates on the historical bases of power and conceptions of justice. The selection of her essays that Mudge includes in his long appendix reveals a keen mind and clear sense of purpose. Her essay on "Nervousness" charts her struggles with opium addiction, and it critiques the often disastrous advice of the male-dominated Victorian medical establishment. Throughout her work it is clear that Sara Coleridge is painfully aware of her marginalized position as a woman and female intellectual in a masculine society.

But such a consciousness did not mean that Sara Coleridge could easily construct an identity for herself in reaction to or apart from the sexism of her culture: "Sara would never claim equality for women or support progressive, 'Whiggish' reforms. She clung fiercely to inherited notions of 'masculine' and 'feminine' that gave men physical, intellectual, and psychological superiority over women--at least nominally" (134-35). Her troubled relationship with her authoritarian father accounts for much of her self-doubt and limited output of original work. As Mudge observes, "she was a woman caught between her allegiance to inherited patriarchal ideals and her desire for an engaged and productive intellectual life" (14). As a way of reconciling the two, Sara Coleridge eventually turned to editorial work as a form of socially sanctioned and intellectually stimulating "service," selecting, reconstructing, and providing commentary on her father's poems and essays for numerous anthologies and editions. Mudge argues convincingly that "she wrote and rewrote his literary life as a way of controlling her patrimony and redefining her marginal career as a woman of letters" (14). In defending Coleridge' s opinions and arguing at length for his inclusion in the canon of "great writers," Sara Coleridge found a way to legitimate her own voice; she used her position as his daughter to promote her own authorship.

Furthermore, Mudge argues that her work was as much as an "exorcism" as it was an "exercise in filial duty" (133-34). In her introduction to the Biographia Literaria and in other essays, Sara Coleridge defended her father as a writer even as she admitted his personal shortcomings, implicitly criticizing his actions toward his family and defining a newly empowered position for herself beyond the narrow confines that Coleridge attempted to impose upon her during his lifetime. She was transgressive at the same time that she was dutiful. In Mudge's words, a form of "submission [proved] an increasingly effective form of mastery" (122).

In several senses, Sara Coleridge's life and career were successful ones; certainly Mudge demonstrates the central role that she played in the establishment of her father's literary reputation, a role that historians have usually attributed to her husband, Henry. Furthermore, despite her bouts of depression and struggles with addiction, Sara Coleridge eventually achieved personal fulfillment as well. Mudge writes, "Editorial work became 'not self-sacrifice, but self-realization,' a pathway to completion, a process by which father and daughter, separated throughout their lives, found them selves and each other in a labyrinth of words" (3). Sara Coleridge's success in redefining her personal history is mirrored in Mudge's success at rewriting literary history, for he allows us to appreciate a life and intellect that otherwise would have remained obscure. Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter is a fascinating book, through which we truly "come to a better understanding of the literary and critical traditions of which we are a part" (183). It is a work that will be valued highly not only by scholars working in gender studies and nineteenth-century literary history, but also by any reader who is intrigued by the complex relationship between literary patrimony and production.

Donald E. Hall

University of Maryland