Susan Wiseman's Conspiracy and Virtue reconsiders the relationships, as her subtitle states, among women, writing, and politics in seventeenth-century England. These three topics are productively analyzed together, Wiseman argues, both because gender was a fundamentally contingent category in the seventeenth century and because women's theoretical exclusion from politics meant that the techniques of literary writing “figural language, myth, narrative and poetry” were employed to provide a manner of discussing something that was not supposed to exist (9). Attention to the subtleties of writing and to the contingent nature of relations among gender, politics, and writing is necessary to understand not only women's relation to politics, but also, Conspiracy and Virtue argues, politics more broadly conceived. The book's introduction makes the compelling claim that women's theoretical exclusion from politics shaped not only rhetorical strategies for talking about politics and gender but also the type of politics that emerged from the politically pivotal seventeenth century. The hypothetical exclusion of women from politics, the book argues, produced a politics that was “figurative, oblique, complex” (3). Ambiguity, interpretation, empathy, and contradiction are all markers of the kind of flexible thinking and writing that characterized women's political engagement. This feminized model of political participation came to be seen, Conspiracy and Virtue argues intriguingly, as not exclusively feminine, but rather more generally political. Thus, attention to the relations among writing, gender, and politics reveals important things not only, or even primarily, about gender, but also about both politics and literary writing at a time when both were undergoing major transformation, to modernity.

Conspiracy and Virtue is organized both chronologically and thematically: paired chapters analyze a historical moment in which women, writing, and politics were interacting in a specific way. The first chapter examines the rhetoric, most interestingly of exemplarity, about women and politics in the early seventeenth century. Chapter 2 focuses on the early seventeenth-century letters of “hot protestant” and “exemplary wife” Brilliana Harley and the diaries and art projects sponsored by Lady Anne Clifford (78). This chapter demonstrates the ways that women were brought into politics “through materials often seen as parts of the barrier to such involvement,” in particular, property and inheritance laws (79). The next two chapters analyze the writings of a number of women—mainly Sarah Wright and Elizabeth Poole—during the sectarian conflict of the late 1640s. They analyze the role that religious conflict—divine grace in the case of Wright and visionary experience in Poole's example—played in formulating gendered political platforms. The chapter on Poole does especially nice analysis of the way that her rhetoric combines sexual and political metaphors and ideas (of divine subordination, contract theory, patriarchalism, and the body) to make her political argument, which is that the “commonwealth is both contractual and divinely regulated, both separately political and unified with the social” (154). Wiseman makes a great point about the relation of visions and interpretation, convincingly showing how gender, politics, and spirituality could be productively combined by a thoughtful woman writer.

As Conspiracy and Virtue moves into the second half of the century, it also addresses more conventionally literary questions. “The Politics of Genre” section investigates the relationship between generic expectations and female experience. Chapter 5 analyzes how the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Lucy Hutchinson attempted to balance the competing demands of aesthetic and religious or political achievement, while chapter 6 explores how the actual life of Queen Christina, “partly symbolic and partly forensic,” necessarily remodeled theories about women and politics (254). The last pair of chapters, “Legitimacy and Scandal,” explores strategies of authentication, both political and personal, in writing between the Restoration and 1685. Here Conspiracy and Virtue is at its strongest in terms of showing how literary modes of writing, especially memoir, were used to historical advantage. Here also the analytical category of public and private is productively brought to bear on the literary texts, in her argument that private virtue, including the feminized quality of subjection to the law, came to stand in for public virtue. The suppleness of her feminist project is displayed in the ways that Wiseman combines this kind of typical feminist argument—in short, that women's weakness is their strength—with a more subtle argument about female historical significance. For example, chapter 8 argues that Lady Russell's tactics of writing and publication, and not her husband's actual belief or actions, were what converted Richard Russell into a Whig martyr, and indeed set the model for the patriot martyr of the nineteenth century. In these final chapters, Wiseman argues against what she calls the critical tendency to “depoliticize” female virtue (358). Although she is not of course the first to take this approach, Conspiracy and Virtue brings new ways of thinking about this problem to bear on primary texts not typically grouped in this way.

Wiseman situates her book at the intersections of three scholarly projects: feminism, contract theory, and the historical relationship between public and private. Given the ambition of combining these topics in multiple genres from throughout the century, it is no surprise that the central arguments are sometimes opaque or diffuse. The book's great strength lies in its close reading of the way that rhetorics of gender and politics were creatively mixed by women writers, to support both their political and gender beliefs. The reliance on other eclectic methods sometimes leads to what appear to be non sequiturs, for example, brief references to critics like Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Giorgio Agamben that feel culturally obligatory rather than necessary to the argument at hand. There are moments of great clarity and force, but the writing sometimes feels bloodless and tentative, lacking precision in methodology and a vigorous authorial presence. Wiseman is quite aware of the interpretive and political minefield in which she is treading, and in places, especially in the introduction and conclusion, she passionately explains and defends the particularities of her own project. I finished Conspiracy and Virtue thinking that the topic was much too rich for one book, and hoping that Wiseman, and others, will continue working with these primary materials and questions.