From Bayesian analysis of COI barcodes, using single samples selected to represent each of the species from <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0132358#pone.0132358.g002" target="_blank">Fig 2</a> and using the birth-death process for speciation on the tree. The tree is dated in Ma by setting the date for the divergence with the Mendacibombus outgroup to 34 Ma [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0132358#pone.0132358.ref033" target="_blank">33</a>]. Values at each node: posterior probability / age in Ma. Nodes with support p≥0.8 show 95% confidence limits for the date estimate as grey bars; nodes with support p<0.8 have the values shown in grey; nodes with support p<0.66 are shown collapsed. The vertical gray line show the 1.3 Ma position to distinguish between the two time periods. The extreme food specialization species name with under dashed line.</p

Jiaxing Huang (178661)

Jiandong An (178647)

Jie Wu (10038)

Paul H. Williams (178643)

The subtitle of Joanne Wilkes\u27 elegant and meticulous monograph is somewhat misleading. Although Austen, Bronte and Eliot make regular appearances, as one would expect the three major female literary figures of the nineteenth century to do, the work does not seek to investigate their critical histories - something which Wilkes has already done in a compelling essay published in Joanne Shattock\u27s collection Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (2001). Instead, Wilkes\u27 attention here is firmly directed at the careers of the critics who, for the most part, remain on the margins of Victorian studies: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, and the better known Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward.
Margaret Oliphant lambasted critics who grouped women writers simply on the basis of gender, and grumbled that \u27the idea of starting with [Austen] for a criticism on George Eliot is the sublime of absurdity\u27 (p. 127). Perhaps with this warning in mind, Wilkes makes painstaking differentiations between her subjects, who are discussed individually. An appealing consequence of this approach is its ability to display the sheer diversity of nineteenth-century women\u27s writing. For Maria Jane Jewsbury, anonymous reviewing was \u27an opportunity to reconcile her desire to publish with her reservations about seeking fame\u27 (p. 43); the more discreet Sara Coleridge\u27s \u27constant lauding of the  feminine  in women\u27s lives and writing was in part a way of reassuring herself and others that ... she was still herself  thoroughly feminine\u27  (p. 55). The historians Lawrance, Williams, and Kavanagh also found that their perceptions of themselves and of their female subjects overlapped. Lawrance felt that women could take on qualities traditionally associated with masculinity, \u27such as intellectual powers and political acumen\u27 (p. 83); Kavanagh repeatedly argued that women were to be thanked for introducing into fiction the \u27exploration of the inner psychological life\u27 (p. 78), and Williams downplayed both the importance of the poets whose achievements she traced and her own, despite making strong claims for the value of hidden influences

Wilkes, Joanne

UNL | Libraries

University of Nebraska - Lincoln
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
The George Eliot Review English, Department of
2010
Review of Women Reviewing Women in
Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical
Reception of lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and
George Eliot
Joanne Wilkes
Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger
Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and
the Women's Studies Commons
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has
been accepted for inclusion in The George Eliot Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln.
Wilkes, Joanne, "Review of Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of lane Austen,
Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot" (2010). The George Eliot Review. 569.
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger/569
Joanne Wilkes, Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: 
The Critical Reception of lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot 
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 2000. ISBN 978 0 7546 6336 2. £50 
The subtitle of Joanne Wilkes' elegant and meticulous monograph is somewhat misleading. 
Although Austen, Bronte and Eliot make regular appearances, as one would expect the three 
major female literary figures of the nineteenth century to do, the work does not seek to 
investigate their critical histories - something which Wilkes has already done in a compelling 
essay published in Joanne Shattock's collection Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 
(2001). Instead, Wilkes' attention here is firmly directed at the careers of the critics who, for 
the most part, remain on the margins of Victorian studies: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara 
Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, and the better 
known Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward. 
Margaret Oliphant lambasted critics who grouped women writers simply on the basis of 
gender, and grumbled that 'the idea of starting with [Austen] for a criticism on George Eliot is 
the sublime of absurdity' (p. 127). Perhaps with this warning in mind, Wilkes makes 
painstaking differentiations between her subjects, who are discussed individually. An appealing 
consequence of this approach is its ability to display the sheer diversity of nineteenth-century 
women's writing. For Maria Jane Jewsbury, anonymous reviewing was 'an opportunity to 
reconcile her desire to publish with her reservations about seeking fame' (p. 43); the more 
discreet Sara Coleridge's 'constant lauding of the "feminine" in women's lives and writing was 
in part a way of reassuring herself and others that ... she was still herself "thoroughly 
feminine'" (p. 55). The historians Lawrance, Williams, and Kavanagh also found that their 
perceptions of themselves and of their female subjects overlapped. Lawrance felt that women 
could take on qualities traditionally associated with masculinity, 'such as intellectual powers 
and political acumen' (p. 83); Kavanagh repeatedly argued that women were to be thanked for 
introducing into fiction the 'exploration of the inner psychological life' (p. 78), and Williams 
downplayed both the importance of the poets whose achievements she traced and her own, 
despite making strong claims for the value of hidden influences. 
The sections on Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant and, to a lesser extent, Mary Augusta Ward, 
will be of most interest to George Eliot scholars. Mozley's sense that 'there is nothing in Adam 
Bede so surprizing as its authorship' (p. 108) was widely shared, and these chapters deftly bring 
out the remarkable ambivalence that so many women writers felt about the novelist. Uneasy 
competitiveness affected Mrs Humphry Ward's stance towards Eliot, who she found old-
fashioned despite being forced to acknowledge that 'her own salient sucess, Robert Elsmere, 
was in some measure attributable to Eliot's example' (p. 156). Oliphant's professional jealousy 
of Eliot, displayed in her Autobiography, is more widely known, and complicated by the fact 
that her own Chronicles of Carlingford had once been attributed to Eliot. Nevertheless, 
Oliphant was fascinated by the extent to which Eliot revealed herself in her novels, and mined 
The Mill on the Floss for the insight into the novelist which she perceptively felt that Eliot's 
husband and biographer J. W. Cross had failed to offer. The difficulty of 'pinning down' Eliot's 
identity also preoccupied Mozley, who famously was the first critic to correctly identify Eliot's 
gender. In one of the most successful sections of this monograph, Wilkes reveals how Mozley 
96 
held rather definitive ideas about gendered writing (the eye for detail, clerical focus, and 
observational stance mark out the author of Adam Bede as a woman) whilst, paradoxically, 
manipulating the gendered inflexions of her own critical voice with remarkable self-awareness. 
A High Church female critic posing confidently as a male essayist, Mozley nevertheless 
expected 'novels to bear the signs of their authors' characters' (p. 109), and was appalled by 
her discovery not of Eliot's gender but her lack of faith. Together, these sections throw 
interesting light on the expectations that critics projected onto Eliot, and their irritation when 
these were not met. 
The subject of anonymity, which preoccupied critics and novelists alike, runs throughout the 
work. Alexis Easley's First-person anonymous: women writers and Victorian print media, 
1830-70 (2004) focused on Christian Johnstone, Martineau, Gaskell, Eliot and Rossetti, and 
Wilkes offers a welcome complementary inquiry into how lesser-known female critics 
responded to the imposition or choice of anonymity. We are usefully reminded that the fear of 
seeing their work devalued was at least as powerful a motivation for anonymity as that of being 
accused of impropriety. Disappointingly, Wilkes does not make the most of one of the 
consequences of anonymous criticism: the speculations and misattributions that it provoked. 
The study mentions many of these - from Sara Coleridge's belief that Currer Bell was a man, 
Oliphant's similar conviction about Eliot, and Eliot's mistaken assumption that Mozley was a 
clergyman, to G. H. Lewes's misattribution of Jewsbury's essay on JaneAusten to a male critic 
- but shies from considering how these errors confrrm the elusiveness of 'female' writing, or 
what the obsessive desire to uncover the real 'identity' of authors might suggest about the 
relationship between Victorian novelists and their public. Indeed, the critics discussed here 
wished to find a clear relationship between the life and beliefs of female authors and their 
works, which led them to celebrate the harmony apparent in Austen's life and lament what they 
saw as the inconsistencies in Eliot's. Yet these same critics submitted to the demands of their 
editors in a manner that created friction between their beliefs and their publications: as Wilkes 
skilfully investigates, Sara Coleridge found all references to Keats in her Quarterly Review 
article on Tennyson's The Princess removed, Margaret Oliphant's review of Balzac's letters 
was supplemented with her editor's personal reminiscences of the novelist, and Anne Mozley 
was pressured by Blackwood's to be more hostile to John Stuart Mill than she in fact was. 
Wilkes's laudable desire to avoid smoothing over the significant distinctions between her 
chosen critics, together with the structure of the monograph, make the task of drawing out the 
major arguments and conclusions of the study a little more strenuous than it ought to be. This, 
however, is a small blemish in a work that makes thorough use of unpublished letters and 
manuscripts to convey the sophisticated responses of often overlooked critics to the vexed 
matter of female authorship. 
Juliette Atkinson 
University CoUege London 
97 


English

Review of Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot

The Francis Crick Institute

Dated estimate of phylogeny for species of the subgenus Megabombus.

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln The George Eliot Review English, Department of 2010 Review of Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot Joanne Wilkes Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger  Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Wilkes, Joanne, "Review of Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot" (2010). The George Eliot Review. 569. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger/569 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in The George Eliot Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Joanne Wilkes, Women Reviewing Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Critical Reception of lane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 2000. ISBN 978 0 7546 6336 2. £50 The subtitle of Joanne Wilkes' elegant and meticulous monograph is somewhat misleading. Although Austen, Bronte and Eliot make regular appearances, as one would expect the three major female literary figures of the nineteenth century to do, the work does not seek to investigate their critical histories - something which Wilkes has already done in a compelling essay published in Joanne Shattock's collection Women and Literature in Britain, 1800-1900 (2001). Instead, Wilkes' attention here is firmly directed at the careers of the critics who, for the most part, remain on the margins of Victorian studies: Maria Jane Jewsbury, Sara Coleridge, Hannah Lawrance, Jane Williams, Julia Kavanagh, Anne Mozley, and the better known Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward. Margaret Oliphant lambasted critics who grouped women writers simply on the basis of gender, and grumbled that 'the idea of starting with [Austen] for a criticism on George Eliot is the sublime of absurdity' (p. 127). Perhaps with this warning in mind, Wilkes makes painstaking differentiations between her subjects, who are discussed individually. An appealing consequence of this approach is its ability to display the sheer diversity of nineteenth-century women's writing. For Maria Jane Jewsbury, anonymous reviewing was 'an opportunity to reconcile her desire to publish with her reservations about seeking fame' (p. 43); the more discreet Sara Coleridge's 'constant lauding of the "feminine" in women's lives and writing was in part a way of reassuring herself and others that ... she was still herself "thoroughly feminine'" (p. 55). The historians Lawrance, Williams, and Kavanagh also found that their perceptions of themselves and of their female subjects overlapped. Lawrance felt that women could take on qualities traditionally associated with masculinity, 'such as intellectual powers and political acumen' (p. 83); Kavanagh repeatedly argued that women were to be thanked for introducing into fiction the 'exploration of the inner psychological life' (p. 78), and Williams downplayed both the importance of the poets whose achievements she traced and her own, despite making strong claims for the value of hidden influences. The sections on Anne Mozley, Margaret Oliphant and, to a lesser extent, Mary Augusta Ward, will be of most interest to George Eliot scholars. Mozley's sense that 'there is nothing in Adam Bede so surprizing as its authorship' (p. 108) was widely shared, and these chapters deftly bring out the remarkable ambivalence that so many women writers felt about the novelist. Uneasy competitiveness affected Mrs Humphry Ward's stance towards Eliot, who she found old-fashioned despite being forced to acknowledge that 'her own salient sucess, Robert Elsmere, was in some measure attributable to Eliot's example' (p. 156). Oliphant's professional jealousy of Eliot, displayed in her Autobiography, is more widely known, and complicated by the fact that her own Chronicles of Carlingford had once been attributed to Eliot. Nevertheless, Oliphant was fascinated by the extent to which Eliot revealed herself in her novels, and mined The Mill on the Floss for the insight into the novelist which she perceptively felt that Eliot's husband and biographer J. W. Cross had failed to offer. The difficulty of 'pinning down' Eliot's identity also preoccupied Mozley, who famously was the first critic to correctly identify Eliot's gender. In one of the most successful sections of this monograph, Wilkes reveals how Mozley 96 held rather definitive ideas about gendered writing (the eye for detail, clerical focus, and observational stance mark out the author of Adam Bede as a woman) whilst, paradoxically, manipulating the gendered inflexions of her own critical voice with remarkable self-awareness. A High Church female critic posing confidently as a male essayist, Mozley nevertheless expected 'novels to bear the signs of their authors' characters' (p. 109), and was appalled by her discovery not of Eliot's gender but her lack of faith. Together, these sections throw interesting light on the expectations that critics projected onto Eliot, and their irritation when these were not met. The subject of anonymity, which preoccupied critics and novelists alike, runs throughout the work. Alexis Easley's First-person anonymous: women writers and Victorian print media, 1830-70 (2004) focused on Christian Johnstone, Martineau, Gaskell, Eliot and Rossetti, and Wilkes offers a welcome complementary inquiry into how lesser-known female critics responded to the imposition or choice of anonymity. We are usefully reminded that the fear of seeing their work devalued was at least as powerful a motivation for anonymity as that of being accused of impropriety. Disappointingly, Wilkes does not make the most of one of the consequences of anonymous criticism: the speculations and misattributions that it provoked. The study mentions many of these - from Sara Coleridge's belief that Currer Bell was a man, Oliphant's similar conviction about Eliot, and Eliot's mistaken assumption that Mozley was a clergyman, to G. H. Lewes's misattribution of Jewsbury's essay on JaneAusten to a male critic - but shies from considering how these errors confrrm the elusiveness of 'female' writing, or what the obsessive desire to uncover the real 'identity' of authors might suggest about the relationship between Victorian novelists and their public. Indeed, the critics discussed here wished to find a clear relationship between the life and beliefs of female authors and their works, which led them to celebrate the harmony apparent in Austen's life and lament what they saw as the inconsistencies in Eliot's. Yet these same critics submitted to the demands of their editors in a manner that created friction between their beliefs and their publications: as Wilkes skilfully investigates, Sara Coleridge found all references to Keats in her Quarterly Review article on Tennyson's The Princess removed, Margaret Oliphant's review of Balzac's letters was supplemented with her editor's personal reminiscences of the novelist, and Anne Mozley was pressured by Blackwood's to be more hostile to John Stuart Mill than she in fact was. Wilkes's laudable desire to avoid smoothing over the significant distinctions between her chosen critics, together with the structure of the monograph, make the task of drawing out the major arguments and conclusions of the study a little more strenuous than it ought to be. This, however, is a small blemish in a work that makes thorough use of unpublished letters and manuscripts to convey the sophisticated responses of often overlooked critics to the vexed matter of female authorship. Juliette Atkinson University CoUege London 97 

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Dated estimate of phylogeny for species of the subgenus <i>Megabombus</i>.

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