Nadia Valman opens this excellent study with “the untold story of a Jewess,” an anonymous character in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda who brings sorrow to her family through, most likely, sexual fallenness or conversion to Christianity (1). This Jewish woman, unnamed and unnoticed (and although I have read Eliot's novel multiple times, I did not remember her), here represents the many Jewesses in nineteenth-century fiction who have gone unremarked in previous studies of Jews in British literature but who, as Valman persuasively demonstrates, are crucial to its considerations of both Jewish and English identity. Valman's use of the term “Jewess,” with its conventionally diminutive and even disparaging connotations, is itself at first as startling as her evocation of the forgotten Cohen sister. Yet by appropriating this term that had powerful resonance in the nineteenth century, Valman (like the creators of the contemporary blog “Jewess”) recuperates its earlier sense of distinctive identity and sexual and spiritual force. In examining the Jewess as she appears in fiction by Jewish and non-Jewish writers, Valman reestablishes the figure's provocative role and creates nothing short of a new and significant literary history.

The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture focuses on the representation of Jewish women in fiction, but it avoids simply tracing stereotypes. Instead, Valman builds upon the work of Bryan Cheyette, Michael Ragussis, Jonathan Freedman, and others to see how the Jewess as character functions rhetorically over the course of a century in which writers engaged with issues surrounding conversion, nationhood, emancipation, and race, as well as more personal anxieties about art, authorship, and commerce. Using an impressive list of primary texts, including archival sources and works of fiction both well and little known and a vast, comprehensive array of critical and historical studies, Valman demonstrates how the alternately malleable, suffering, rebellious, spiritual, and romantic Jewish heroine of conversion narratives persists throughout the nineteenth century, variously transmuted in the service of authorial goals that were often political as well as aesthetic. Valman identifies recurring character types and relationships in novels written to encourage conversion to Christianity, such as the affection between the Jewess suffering under a narrow patriarchy and the kind Christian woman who facilitates her conversion or the romance between such a Jewess and her liberating Christian suitor—a prototype that, as Valman points out, can be traced back to Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. Valman first examines the persistence of this Jewess as transformed by Scott in Ivanhoe (1819), a novel about the formation of English national identity, and by Trollope in Nina Balatka (1869), in which the Jewess's ultimate loyalty to her people serves to idealize both herself and her nation in an age of increasing tolerance, while at the same time she figures and reflects “the contradictions inherent in nineteenth-century liberal attempts to imagine an expanded polity” (50).

Early nineteenth-century debates about Jewish political emancipation in Britain (granted finally in 1858, when Lord Rothschild was able to take his seat in Parliament) are explored even more directly, yet again through the Jewess, by Jewish writers such as Grace Aguilar and Celia and Marion Moss. One of the great strengths of Valman's analysis is her insistence on historicizing the rhetorical use of the Jewess figure, not only in the case of these early Jewish writers (concerning whom she builds upon the work of Michael Galchinsky) but also in discussions of later writing, in which economic and political anxieties in an age of speculation are played out through Jewesses such as Marie Melmotte in Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1875) and the artistic Jewesses of Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and the Jewish Emily Marion Harris's Estelle (1878). As Valman demonstrates, these texts use images of Jewish women's suffering and rebellion to reflect additionally on ideas of nationhood and tolerance. Valman's final substantive chapter, on the satiric/realist fin de siècle fiction of Jewish writers Amy Levy and Julia Frankau, explores how the figure of the Jewess, adapted from early conversionary texts, played a role as writers responded to cultural and anthropological figurations of Jews as degenerate.

Valman's argument presupposes that while specifics of representation change through the century, patterns remain relevant. Thus we find the Jewess of the conversion novel, who rebels against patriarchal insistence that she marry a Jew, transmuted into Marie Melmotte, rebelling against her father's choice of a rich aristocratic husband, and Judith Quixano, of Levy's Reuben Sachs, oppressed not by her father but by the marriage market and rebelling little when abandoned by her ambitious Jewish beloved. Yet, all three can be seen as redemptive sufferers, and all share the transgressive pastime of secret reading: for Judith it is Swinburne's passionate verse; for Marie, romantic novels; and for Leila Ada and others, Christian Scripture. Valman's conclusions, while far reaching, are never forced, and the rigorously clear organization of her argument makes following it a pleasure. Throughout, this book reminds us that it is impossible to examine nineteenth-century Jewish writing or representations of Jews without reference to the Christian context or discourse within which they were produced and which in fact they helped develop. Moreover, it demonstrates the inextricable imbrication of gender and ethnicity in fictional representations and cultural constructs, revealing how much has been overlooked in examinations of Jewishness based on images of Jewish men. Ultimately, this study delineates a persistent pattern by which ambivalent views of Jews and Jewishness in British culture play out in a “bifurcation” of the “irredeemable” Jew and the redemptive Jewess (209). Indeed, it establishes the pervasiveness of Jewesses, along with Jews and Jewishness, in the mainstream of nineteenth-century British literature and culture.

The concluding chapter of The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture ties together the chronological and thematic threads of its critical narrative and then reflects briefly on the Jewess in modernist fiction and the figure's relevance to twenty-first-century feminist and queer studies. Valman sees the hybridity and complexity of the Jewess as paradigmatic of the ways in which queerness, like Jewishness, “troubles categories,” yet at the same time she points to the persistence of the suffering “Eastern … Other” as “lodged within the structure of liberal feminist self-definition” (217). While Valman's account is richly analytic and not at all polemical, the idea of a hybrid character type used as a martyr to some external goal (whether as part of a narrative plot or to serve an authorial purpose) implies the danger inherent in such representations. Valman ends her book with the statement that the terms “Judaism, suffering and redemption” remain “intricately related and politically and culturally charged” (219). Her valuable, profound, and erudite study thus traces the history of a still-contested symbolism. Implicitly, it urges the need to recognize Jewish as well as female self-definitions and the extent to which they continue to be shaped by and to shape the surrounding culture.