The Enthusiasts, as their intellectual leader, the writer and pedagogue Narcyza Żmichowska (1819–76) called them only once, well after their most salient period of activity in the 1840s, were a group of Polish women who sought greater national, spiritual, and gendered freedom, expressed though bonds of friendship and fellow-feeling. This book considers their writings, especially Żmichowska’s, for what they can show us about gender, nationalism, women’s movements, education, and religiosity in the Polish lands from the late 1830s to the mid-1870s. Connected through salons, publications in the same journals, and especially through their prodigious epistolary communication, Żmichowska and her contemporaries demonstrated “patriotic zeal and a wider ‘divine impulse’ [in their] work for the greater good and individual self-development” (7). The Enthusiasts’ demands for what Cornett calls “affective freedom” for women came before the period of women’s suffrage movements, and unlike those later movements, which tended to be more secular or focused on charity, the Enthusiasts sought “perfection” through a religiously inflected vision of love that would empower women while uplifting society.

The major source base for The Politics of Love is the approximately 1,200 published letters between members of the group, mainly letters from Żmichowska to contemporaries. Cornett cross-references these letters with diaries, police records, and published accounts, seeking to contextualize them within the larger, global historiography of nineteenth-century women’s movements. The result is a rich intellectual history of a person and her contemporaries in the Polish and broader European setting in which their ideas appeared. The Polish context is capably addressed in the first two chapters, which are about, respectively, what Cornett calls “Partition Poland” and the Enthusiasts’ nationalist conspiratorial activities in the 1840s, when some of them, including Żmichowska, were arrested and placed in confinement.

Born from the deep relationships forged in conspiratorial circles and her status as a woman who made her living as a governess and writer, Żmichowska’s overarching pursuit of freedom—national, societal, and personal—sought to reshape patriarchal Polish society by elevating women’s homosocial relationships while maintaining their right to remain unmarried, childless, or divorced. In the third chapter, “The Right to Love,” Cornett observes that the “Enthusiasts claimed the right to love freely, but this affective freedom did not explicitly entail sexual fulfillment” (110). Żmichowska’s fervent relationship with the aristocrat Paulina Zbyszewska, for example, sparked controversy and gossip in Polish society, and perhaps even her denunciation to authorities, but nowhere in their correspondence is there any mention of homosexual relations, even if the texts are replete with infatuated, affectionate language. Consistent with Romantic thought, Cornett argues, the Enthusiasts emphasized “the heart” and individuality over rationality. Unlike Byron’s promiscuous Don Juan, they sought something more sublime than mere sexual liaisons, which they associated with the dissolute aristocracy. The absence of sex was intentional: the effort to assert women’s right to “greater independence in private and public life” could not afford opening itself to accusations that challenged women’s status as “thinking, moral beings” (110).

While radical in their time, the Enthusiasts’ vision for “brotherly/sisterly love” between men and women did not insist on their strict equality (97). Men and women could be different, but each had to seek their better selves, and significantly, should be educated in the same way. The fourth chapter argues that the “women’s question” for the enthusiasts was “a question of the sexes,” one that required men to change as well (135). The fifth chapter, after considering contemporary European debates on women’s education, sets up the contrast between Klementyna Hoffmanowa, Żmichowska’s teacher, who advocated an austere, aristocratic, and largely traditional model of educating girls, even while she herself did not fit that mold, and that of Żmichowska, who sought to educate girls and boys similarly, by promoting the value of learning and free thought. In the 1860s, Żmichowska characterized education as a matter of self-realization. She acknowledged that lack of capital, social and material, most often got in the way of women’s ability to realize their potential. Relationships with other women could help women in their efforts at self-perfection, until men themselves proved “capable of loving as wholly as women” (192).

Eliza Orzeszkowa, the Positivist writer, opined a dozen years after Żmichowska’s death that the Enthusiasts had been “bold” and creative but had “‘drifted into absurdity’” (202). Their lofty pursuit of sororal love did not fit the mold she promoted in her novels of the diligent mother. The Enthusiasts, Cornett notes, had something of a renaissance in interwar Poland but have since fallen from view, with only scant mention of their patriotic efforts, if any. Cornett’s analysis of the Enthusiasts challenges the predominant narrative in Poland that reduces women to “mother-patriots” and “bearers of the Catholic faith,” while marking feminism as exogenous (203). She shows how, for Żmichowska and her interlocutors, the pursuit of what they saw as divine love was a personal, spiritual, and political challenge to the hegemonic structures that limited their freedom as Polish women.