Fiona Price's Revolutions in Taste, responsibly written and carefully researched, is a significant work of feminist Romantic scholarship. Foregrounding gender as an aesthetic and political factor, Price traces the democratization of aesthetic taste as it was retheorized by British and Irish women writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Organized thematically, each chapter accommodates a caravan of texts, most of which get the benefit of close reading. Building upon the work of Marlon B. Ross, David Simpson, and Jacqueline M. Labbe, and marking a shift away from the influential arguments of Anne Mellor, Price traces the meaning of taste as it escapes from its affiliations with Burke, Hume, and Shaftesbury, moves through disreputable and feminized literary genres and the work of women writers, and connects travelers to those laboring anonymously in out-of-the-way locales. The writers considered here, situating aesthetic knowledge in ways resistant to commodity and fashion culture, reconfigure the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque, or escape these categories completely. Thus, Price reveals how women remapped aesthetics for a new revolutionary century.

Four strands of argument, spanning across the chapters, give this study its skeleton. First, and most important, is an account of how women writers—for example, Anna Letitia Barbauld—took aesthetic categories inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and made them more inclusive. Suddenly, tasteful citizens could be discovered anywhere, recruited from a mixture of classes and locales and professions, constituting a diverse group trained by the literary texts at their mutual disposal. Second, Price reveals how women's aesthetic thought situated itself at the intersection of economics and sympathy, such as we see in the work of Eliza Fenwick and Charlotte Smith. Third, Price shows how the prevailing stereotype of women as consumers inadvertently allowed women writers—for example, Mary Wollstonecraft—to enter contemporary debates about fashion and, from there, aesthetics. Travel, especially insofar as it forced local communities to reimagine regional belonging, is the fourth major concern here, a strand of argument traced through Ann Radcliffe's Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and extended in discussions of Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Mary Shelley. Alternating between local attention to labor and identity and more global attention to economics and tourism, this ambivalently cosmopolitan writing ameliorated class conflict.

These four strands contribute to an overarching if intermittent overall claim about the efficacy of the literary as such. Here, literary texts have the capacity to remake gender, politics, aesthetics, economy, and consumer culture. Price's study reveals how maligned genres such as the ballad, the tale, and the gothic novel, precisely through the flexibility earned by their provinciality and lack of prestige, became ideal vehicles through which women could found a democratic aesthetics. Thus, perhaps ironically, “taste” is reconfigured from below through the very practice of literary tastelessness. Price locates this capacity in William Wordsworth and Barbauld, and especially in Clara Reeve, whose nostalgic uses of the Gothic present literary training as an alternative to the consumerism of the late eighteenth century. Thus, for Reeve, literature promises a viable pathway back to precapitalist values. Similarly, Price highlights Sydney Owenson's investment in the transformative power of creative imagination. Literary fiction in these cases becomes the engine of democracy; training in taste, once divested of its eighteenth-century elitism, becomes the antidote to luxury, fashion, and commodity.

Drawing upon the rich archive held at Chawton House Library, Price brings well-known texts such as Frankenstein, The Wild Irish Girl, and The Mysteries of Udolpho into coequal conversation with relatively neglected ones like Barbauld's “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste,” Sophia and Harriet Lee's The Canterbury Tales, and Priscilla Wakefield's Mental Improvement. Price finds the heart of her study in the analysis of this last text, depicting Mental Improvement as the theoretical bridge between Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth insofar as it fuses art and economics. I appreciate and admire how this book introduces its readers to neglected women's texts, how it affords those texts compelling close readings, and how ambivalently it situates these texts alongside the male giants of high Romanticism. Still, surprisingly often, the old “visionary company” gives meaning to the enterprise: Reeve is here an alternative to Wordsworth, Barbauld to Coleridge. And for all of the emphasis on getting beyond the binaries established by Burke and Hume, both remain present throughout. Moreover, Price shows how women writers were deeply invested in “Romantic” concepts such as original genius in solitude, or the creative power of the imagination. Discussing Wollstonecraft's Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, for instance, Price praises its unconventionality, its independence from Rousseau, and its celebration of “active” behavior. “Activity” serves an important purpose for the project, as it allows Price to associate the 1790s gender debates with aspects of visual culture and the meaning of aesthetic taste.

Although I admire and welcome this argument, I do worry that, in championing activity, independence, and originality, and in describing these activities as a “revolution,” Price risks reaffirming the very aesthetic investments that women's writing seems poised to displace. Of course, with Price, I recognize in sublimity and beauty traps that would consign women to the role of aesthetic objects. Price insightfully shows how writers such as Barbauld retheorize sublimity so as to authorize progressive change. But I wonder whether Price, in an effort to move beyond the aesthetic binaries that have long structured the study of Romantic ideology, and first justified the explosion of interest in the period's women writers, might be taking unnecessary refuge in equally tenuous subject/object and active/passive binaries. In Price's analysis, women writers avoid “the derogatory position” assigned to them by Burke by thinking creatively and training their readers to “reach aesthetic and political judgments by a process far more complex than merely looking … at the favored works of the past” (43). Indeed, Wollstonecraft here trains her readers to develop “a more probing gaze, avoiding passive dependence on the senses” (52). But it seems to me that these writers are deeply engaged, as is Price, with works of the past. More importantly, it seems to me that their investments in complexity, subjectivity, and activity could just as usefully be scrutinized, challenged, and deconstructed. Reconsideration of a Wordsworthian “wise passiveness,” for instance, in relation to Price's argument and traced through the work of Rousseau and Wollstonecraft alike, could quickly destabilize or compromise the gains that Price so admirably makes in her analysis.

Revolutions in Taste is an effective book that makes an important argument, one especially needed at this moment of resurgent theoretical interest in aesthetics and politics. Given this situation, it is striking that Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu make no genuine impact on the analysis, being considered and praised only briefly; recent work in Romantic aesthetics by Marc Redfield and J. Jennifer Jones is conspicuously not considered here. Instead of joining those conversations, Price's work finds its bearings in the work on gender and Romanticism from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Framing its argument as an extension of Ross and a challenge to Mellor, the theoretical tools at work here have been available for two decades; still, Price has been the first to think these questions through in this way. So even if this study seems curiously belated given its subject matter, such a feeling might alert us to the continuing need for its contribution and illustrate the need to consider gender more carefully, as Price does, in the critical conversations about politics and aesthetics to come.