Widows have played a prominent role in British literature, from Chaucer's Wife of Bath, to Shakespeare's Volumnia, and on through Jane Austen's complete canon of widows. As independent women, sexually experienced and often controlling private property, widows have challenged patriarchal norms, appealing to those authors trying to define women's proper place in society. But despite the widow's important status, studies of these women have previously been limited to miscellaneous articles, often on Restoration drama, or collections of historical essays, most devoted to the social history of widows in the medieval age. What has been lacking all these years is a book-length study of the literary representation of widows. Now Karen Bloom Gevirtz has made the first foray into the field, focusing on the eighteenth-century English novel. Writing in a style accessible to any thoughtful reader, Gevirtz provides an encyclopedic approach to her topic, producing a volume that will serve as a valuable resource for anyone interested in these troublesome women.

Gevirtz concentrates on Britain's shift from an agrarian to a commercial economy, arguing that eighteenth-century authors used the character of the widow to define and limit women's role within an emerging capitalist system. After an introductory overview, she organizes her chapters according to widows’ varied places in the new economic structure: rich widows, poor widows, working widows, and criminal widows. The book reaches its climax with a chapter on Jane Austen, followed by an appendix that examines the previously unpublished records of private charities that aided widows. Within each section Gevirtz examines prevalent stereotypes, often showing how the eighteenth century's culture of sensibility combined with economic factors to influence the representation of women. Thus, her chapter on poverty and the widow opens with the following assertion: “The eighteenth-century novel's poor widows consistently appear as passive, dependent, and grateful, a depiction that underscores not the calamity of their poverty but the triumph of others’ generosity. … The representation of poverty shifted the focus from labor and commerce to emotion and hierarchy. As a result, the novel's representation of the poor widow offered another way to model the exclusion of women from the economy, simultaneously justifying and hiding the realities of emerging capitalism, and helping to establish the novel as a genre and sensibility as an ideology” (96).

Gevirtz's decision to classify widows according to their economic status has both strengths and weaknesses. Scholars interested in the subject matter will come away from each chapter with a list of characters and titles (some obscure, some famous) for further study, and the appendix will be of particular interest to specialists. But the impulse to group texts together and identify common stereotypes can sometimes overlook a character's unique qualities. For instance, Gevirtz consistently describes Austen's Lady Susan as an “affluent widow,” but in Austen's text Lady Susan is characterized as a woman “in narrow circumstances,” whose precarious, dependent position partly inspires her selfish machinations. She, like many widows in English literature, resists easy classification. More important, in the process of identifying common patterns in multiple texts, Gevirtz rarely allows time for in-depth study of individual authors or characters. On any given page the reader is likely to encounter four or five different titles. The effect is swift paced and bibliographic but somewhat overwhelming. One wishes that Gevirtz would devote more chapters to single authors, using her extensive knowledge of common patterns and themes to uncover more writers who break the mold.

Gevirtz does this with her final chapter on Jane Austen, and to good effect. She begins by acknowledging how Lady Susan perpetuated eighteenth-century stereotypes of the wicked widow, using her sexuality to manipulate men, compete with women, and control her daughter. But as Austen's writing matured, so did her approach to widows. As Gevirtz points out, in Austen's major novels, “widows consistently complicate old dichotomies with a hybrid of characteristics associated formerly with feudal agrarianism or unstable commercialism. They indicate a view of economics that balances between the old and new systems without demonizing or deifying either one” (139). In the case of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Gevirtz shows how Austen takes the standard features of a virtuous affluent widow—attention to the well-being of her tenants, considerable maternal care for her daughter, residence in the country (as opposed to the corrupt city)—and turns them on their head by having Lady Catherine practice them with such fanaticism that she ultimately resembles the eighteenth century's idea of a wicked widow “overbearing, interfering, officious, unintelligent, unaccomplished, bigoted and selfish” (144).

Because Austen is the sole author whom Gevirtz examines in depth, it seems as if the eighteenth century languished in stereotypes, whereas Austen's entry into the nineteenth century allowed her “a greater comfort with the commercial economy” (139) that yielded a more complex approach to human nature. But this can’t be the whole story. The best authors from every century have always displayed an appreciation of human complexity that surpasses the stereotypes of their day. Gevirtz acknowledges as much in her brief discussion of Sterne's Widow Wadman: “Widow Wadman's ability to evoke but also to escape the stereotype of the lecherous widow for more sentimental realms reinforces the notion that for Sterne as for other sentimentalists like Goldsmith, mainstream sensibility's dichotomies between passion and reason or sensibility and sexuality do not accurately represent the full range of human experience and human nature” (44).

Sterne was probably not the only eighteenth-century author who resisted simplistic dichotomies. When Gevirtz first introduces Defoe, she shows how his “good ancient widow” from Robinson Crusoe overturns some of Gevirtz's own assertions about the typical poor widow, as quoted above. Similarly, the seven or eight pages that Gevirtz devotes to Moll Flanders demonstrate complexities of characterization that challenge traditional stereotypes. This thread in Gevirtz's argument begs for further elaboration. Given the book's subtitle, Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen, one might hope for an entire chapter on Defoe; the short length of Gevirtz's book would have allowed room for further chapters. It is a testament to the power of her subject that one is left wanting more—more treatment not only of common types but of notable deviations—not just the rule but the exceptions to it.

Nevertheless, in publishing this book Gevirtz has blazed a trail. She has provided a provocative overview, while leaving it to subsequent authors to dig beneath the surface.