In Servants and Paternalism, Julie Nash seeks to reclaim two daughters of relative privilege, Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell, for a new generation of feminist scholars. This slim volume, Nash's third work for the Ashgate Nineteenth Century Series, tracks servant characters who express traditional sentiments about social class while holding powerful positions within their respective plots, thus straddling the line between conservatism and radicalism. Gaskell and Edgeworth use these characters, Nash argues, to explore the complexities of the master/servant (or, more often, mistress/servant) relationship in the first half of the nineteenth century. Simply put, Nash shows how Edgeworth “employs servant characters to illustrate these changing times” (83) and how Gaskell follows suit after Edgeworth's death. Nash's second objective is to yoke the status of the servant to the status of the woman living and writing in a man's world. She does so by using “patriarchy” and “paternalism” as synonyms for tyranny and oppression (104). Outspoken, powerful servants, then, “expose the potential for dehumanization and corruption in the paternalist philosophy” and “undermine the notion that these people are in need of the fatherly guidance of their ‘betters’” (17).

After an introduction that establishes the overlapping careers of the two writers (Edgeworth died soon after Gaskell's first novel appeared), Nash discusses the women's novels in alternating chapters. The Edgeworth chapters begin with the “domestic novels” Helen, Belinda, and Harrington, and then turn to the “revolutionary implications” (83) of the Irish novels Castle Rackrent and Ennui. Nash works hard to explain and defend any hints of anti-Irish sentiment in Edgeworth's novels. To Nash, Edgeworth's “criticism of Ireland's ‘faults' masks a clear admiration for Irish intelligence and resourcefulness,” meaning that Edgeworth knowingly “invokes a familiar stereotype in order to undermine it” (75). Edgeworth's fondness for the Irish people is yet another way to emphasize “the curious tension between Maria Edgeworth the dutiful daughter of patriarchy and Maria Edgeworth the progressive iconoclast” (76). The first Gaskell chapter rehearses the plots of Cranford, Ruth, and Sylvia's Lovers to describe “traditional family and social structures as inadequate remedies for the characters’ struggles” (54). The second chapter, on the industrial novels Mary Barton and North and South, continues the work of Catherine Gallagher's Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (Chicago, 1985). Nash, too, traces Gaskell's failed attempt to integrate domestic and industrial spaces in her novels, but replaces some of Gallagher's skepticism about the attempt with more confidence in Gaskell's design. Nash sees servant characters such as Mary Barton’s Alice Wilson as bridges between public workers and private property owners. Though Mary Barton ultimately “retreats to the paternalistic idea that masters should be kinder to their workers” (96), North and South “[sides] more forcefully with change over tradition” (105–6). Together, the two Gaskell chapters remind readers that servant characters are worth studying in social problem fiction.

Nash's volume is full of interesting local observations (one highlight is her analysis of the prominence of servants in death scenes [116–17]), but a reader looking for new archival finds will be disappointed. To supplement her readings of the novels, Nash mostly quotes from familiar works such as Samuel Smiles's Self Help or Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management and sometimes depends on Richard Altick, Robert Folkenflik, and others for her citations. Readers who want a more theory-based take on paternalism and social class would be better served by David Roberts's Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979) or Bruce Robbins's The Servant's Hand (New York, 1986), both cited by Nash in her introduction. Finally, one shouldn’t expect to leave this volume with many new insights about Gaskell and Edgeworth as part of an interacting community of women writers. Nash is more interested in these women as individuals than in showing how they intersect with each other or with other novelists, as the structure of her book makes clear.

Nash's volume differs from the work of Gallagher, Roberts, and Robbins, or more recent works such as Jonathan Taylor's Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing (New York, 2003) insofar as she combines analysis of the servant with thoughts about the daughter, the wife, and the industrial worker. The volume doesn’t claim to resolve tensions between the “dutiful daughter” and the “progressive iconoclast,” but rather presents them and occasionally bemoans them. Nash continually implies that radicalism should trump tradition and seems disappointed when Gaskell and Edgeworth are only partially up to the challenge. She doesn’t go as far as Gaskell's John Barton, who “considered domestic service as a species of slavery” (102), but she also resists Mary Barton's “somewhat condescending narrator” (103), who calls Barton's stance “exaggerated” (102). Nash feels less ambivalence than her authors. The restless hands driving this project are more than visible beneath the surface.