Politeness, sensibility—the subject and the self—have received tremendous attention from scholars of eighteenth-century society and culture over the past twenty-five years. Soile Ylivuori's Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Bodies, Identities, and Power builds on this literature with the first in-depth study of women's politeness. Defined as an historical and cultural phenomenon, a matrix at the nexus of power and knowledge, politeness was an ideology and a practice that stipulated the rules of conversation, behavior, and movement among English and European elites. It dictated social interactions, especially in heterosocial settings, with the promise of women's moralizing, refining, and polishing effect on men. Ylivuori analyzes prescriptive literature such as conduct books, pamphlets, novels, plays, and periodical literature alongside the autobiographical writings—including journals, letters, and manuscripts—of four prominent women: court favorite Mary Pendarves Delany, bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, the moralist author Catherin Talbot, and the novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney d'Arblay. Informed by the theoretical work of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, and Johanna Oksala, the book skillfully draws out the contradictions in the ideology of politeness, especially the oxymoronic relationship between the need to appear simple, modest, chaste, and unaffected and the practices recommended to and engaged in those who wished to hone and test and improve their performances.

In the introduction Ylivuori defines politeness “as a pervasive master discourse . . . the locus for negotiations of different identities—not only gender, but also for example, class, rank, wealth, nationality, race, sexuality, and health” (3). The focus on politeness “helps us to unravel the relationship between thought and action,” allowing us to understand how people in the past “conceptualise, experience, see, and understand the world around them” (3). After an examination of the book's historiographical and theoretical foundations in chapter 1, chapter 2 analyzes the gendered dimensions of politeness and reviews the early modern scientific and biological knowledge that informed the practice and the discourse. A nuanced analysis of the problem of hypocrisy and dissimulation is the subject of chapter 3 and the relationship between the public and private, interior and exterior forms the object of Ylivuori's explication in chapter 4. The question of self-fashioning and multiple identities animates chapter 5 while chapter 6 explores the various prescriptions for self-discipline.

Ylivuori's preoccupation throughout is the play between the restraints of politeness and the degree to which its practitioners deviated from and resisted those constraints to “achieve freedom from discursive normality” (16). The repeated references to freedom for these elite women from the strictures of the gender norms as defined by the culture of politeness point to the conspicuous absence of any mention of its opposite: slavery. This is especially glaring given that in the eighteenth century the slave trade reached its peak. Between 1701 and 1810, over six million Africans were forcibly exported as slaves to the New World. As Kathleen Wilson and other scholars have shown, despite the distance of the Atlantic, information about the colonies circulated constantly through conversations among merchants, sailors, planters, and everyone and everything that traveled between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, including newspapers, travel accounts, and administrative reports. Slavery was not a far-off problem: there were populations of enslaved people in London and Paris as well as port towns like Bordeaux and Bristol. The Somerset Case made headlines in 1771–72 with coverage of the debates about the legality of slavery in England. European intellectuals, men and women, lived in a world into which the colonies along with raced and chattel slavery were integrated on many levels. Polite thought was “always already” permeated and shaped by the realities of the brutal practices of slavery and the trade.

Any study that includes the terms bodies and power in its title and speaks of “discipline,” “repressive regime,” “submission,” “resistance,” and the desire for autonomy and freedom must somehow recognize, name, or acknowledge the majority of poor men and women throughout England whose freedom was much more circumscribed than any of the elite women and the source of the nation's wealth: raced and commodity slavery. Studies of the self, including Ylivuori's, define the self as creation of social exchange, always co-constituted in opposition to the other, the impoverished or the enslaved. Given these parameters of the self as defined by Ylivuori, her silence on the subject of nonelite and enslaved women is unacceptable. Even if the eighteenth-century female writers mentioned nothing explicit about slavery, bondage, and coercion of enslaved populations, the historian must step in to read against the grain. Certainly, the scholarship on race in the eighteenth century has demonstrated in no uncertain terms that elite culture in Britain, as in the colonies, was invested in its whiteness as well as its wealth.

And of course, England had a population of color, among them some enslaved and some less than free people. If England is the geographic focus, brief speculation about politeness as it related to even the relatively privileged life of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761?–1804) Judge Mansfield's Afro-English grand-niece, who lived in Mansfield's home for thirty years might have demonstrated how empire, colony, race, class, and gender collided impolitely in the metropole. Likewise, the extensive scholarship on English servant women or their representation in eighteenth-century novels would prize open the ideology of politeness as prescribed or practiced by a slightly larger number of people. These thought exercises would go a ways to making the discussion of intersectionality that Ylivuori promises (3, 23–25, 85, 205) more robust and generate insights beyond the effete world of the tiniest minority of the English population, these most elite and privileged, educated white women.