Already well known for her emphasis on the connections between domesticity and the public sphere in eighteenth-century England, in Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution Harriet Guest focuses on the language of sensibility in the years that comprised Britain's wars with revolutionary France, 1793–1815. She ranges across genres—poetry, novels, memoirs, published letters, reviews, and, not least, prints—and across a number of writers from Charlotte Smith to Jane Austen. Although the individual chapters focus on specific authors, the argument does not progress by stages, except in the most oblique fashion. But then, obliquity is in many ways the main theme, for even as women writers were gaining greater public visibility, they had only a halting, uncertain relationship to either the literary marketplace or the hurly-burly of electoral politics.

Guest makes sense of a wide range of women's writing by combining attention to formal qualities, topical concerns, biographical challenges, and the general political context of a time of upheaval. Nothing is predictable in her analysis except a consistent willingness to trace the exigencies of each writer's particular situation and of women writers more generally. In analyzing Smith's 1793 poem about French emigrants to Britain, for example, Guest foregrounds the complexities of Smith's position; the poet wants to create sympathy for the emigrants even while disdaining the “pamper'd Parasites” (30) of the Old Regime and supporting reform in Britain. Even thornier are the politics of Mary Robinson: she rhapsodizes about the newly controversial idea of freedom, yet she writes in Burkean terms about Marie Antoinette and combines carefully plotted campaigns for commercial success with intense fears of isolation and exposure to the urban crowd.

At first glance, then, it might seem surprising that the linchpin of the book is William Godwin. The central chapter, on positive reactions to the memory of Mary Wollstonecraft, is based on readers' responses to Godwin's notorious Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), in which he recounted her love affairs, illegitimate child, and suicide attempts. Women writers felt more comfortable with Godwin than with Wollstonecraft, who, while she was alive, seemed to personify the bad choices that overly emotional women could make. In death, her deep sensibility and female suffering could be commemorated even while her conduct was rejected.

Godwin's role went well beyond his relationship to Wollstonecraft; he helped create the kind of mixed-gender sociability around radical politics and literature that appealed to women writers who could not expect to form such circles on their own. Smith, Robinson, and Amelia Alderson Opie, the subject of the penultimate chapter of Guest's book, all knew Godwin personally, and for Opie, as for many other women, Godwin eagerly took on the role of intellectual mentor. Godwin was one of the few mourners at Robinson's funeral and shared her worries about engagement with a mass market. The highly successful novelist Elizabeth Inchbald, of whom Godwin was also very fond, spoke for many when she said, “I prefer the Society of Men to that of my own Sex” (83).

Given the overlapping ties between Smith, Robinson, Godwin, and Opie, the final chapter on Jane Austen might seem out of place. As Guest herself says, the novels of Austen appear to box up the heady, radical public concerns of writers in the 1790s and return women to their private, domestic space. Yet Austen weaves in several of the strands picked out by her predecessors. Among these is the circuitous way in which even women enthused by revolutionary ideals had to approach politics. Sensibility could turn into enthusiasm, insincerity, or illusion. Austen's novels emphasized the danger of believing in transparent communication, of believing that you could completely understand another person. In a way, then, she took very seriously the earlier writers' emphasis on exchange and conversation and took even more seriously their ambivalence about the potential pitfalls. As a consequence, Austen was able to show the fragility of society's dependence on shared tacit understandings. In this way, supposedly private, interior, and feminine insights intersected, however obliquely, with public considerations.

Guest uses a variety of prints to deepen her analysis of the place of women writers in the politics and literary commerce of the period. Although her probing of the prints' meanings is often suggestive, it is not easy for the reader to follow her lines of argument because the black and white reproductions simply cannot capture the level of necessary detail. Four prints of the Westminster elections of 1796, for example, are used to make a variety of points about women in crowds and Alderson Opie's likely reaction to such gatherings. But other than James Gillray's caricature of Charles Fox, the prints are so packed with figures and so small in reproduction that it is very hard to see individual figures. Moreover, the size of the prints and the techniques used to make them are mostly unnoted, so important information that might have given some context to possible viewer reactions is unavailable. The Gillray print in question, for example, is a hand-colored etching 38 × 30 cm, whereas the Henry Sadd rendition of a Robert Dighton original is a hand-colored mezzotint 63.5 cm × 80.5 cm and therefore quite large. In the book, the reproduction of the latter is only 7.5 cm × 10 cm, and the scores of figures in black and white are virtually indistinguishable to the naked eye. Although this somewhat offhand treatment of prints is common among historians and literary scholars—and this reviewer is not above reproach in this regard—any argument that gives such prominence to prints (this book has 25 of them) ought to provide basic information about them as visual media. That said, readers will find in these essays many new perspectives on women writers making their way in a time of upheaval.