Beth Newman's book Subjects on Display explores the tensions inherent in the representation of the figure of the middle-class woman in nineteenth-century English novels. Her most important achievement is her focus on the pleasure that she suggests a woman could derive from being visible in a conspicuous manner, even while this desire to be a “subject on display” was at odds with social expectations for women in the middle class. Drawing on Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's magisterial work Family Fortunes, Newman argues that the meaning of display in the nineteenth century was unstable, especially for middle-class women, and that close readings of Victorian novels can highlight the contradictions and complexities that women struggled with in their everyday lives. For a Victorian woman to be inconspicuous was to signal her modesty and her moral authority, especially in an evangelical home. At the same time, as the century progressed there was an increasing imperative for the middle class to display their newfound wealth, and a woman's manner and appearance could signal in a very public way the social standing of her family.

Newman is a literary critic who combines literary theory and psychoanalytic theory, notably Lacanian analysis, to provide an interpretative model for understanding the construction of feminine subjectivity in nineteenth-century novels. Newman argues that her use of psychoanalytic theory and a methodology that is historically contextualized enables her to explore the relationship between the social and psychic worlds. Subjects on Display is a contribution to the field of Victorian studies, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Victorian culture and society, that has added immeasurably to historians’ understanding of the period. While historians may find Newman's prose as impenetrable as Lacan's discussion of the symbolic, to guide her readers Newman discusses her approach in depth and provides in the introduction a lucid and helpful discussion of key concepts and how she intends to deploy them. Furthermore, as Newman points out, historians and scholars of visual culture have tended to concentrate on exploring the subjectivity of the observer, not the observed—a deficit she argues that her use of Lacanian analysis helps to correct.

Following Mary Poovey and Nancy Armstrong, who posit that the ideal woman from the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century was invisible, Newman argues that by the mid-nineteenth century this need for women to be inconspicuous created tensions that can be traced in Victorian literature. Through a nuanced consideration of the works primarily of English writers, including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, Newman argues persuasively that an exploration of the subjectivity of the observed adds to our understanding of Victorian femininity. Newman's most convincing literary readings are in her chapters on the novels of Brontë and Eliot, where she examines the significance of the gaze and its relation to the subjectivity of the observed. Her subtle reading of Brontë's work explores how the paradoxical figure in Victorian literature of a retiring woman who triumphs over more conspicuous and dazzling rivals was a way of understanding and a response to the social expectations that made personal display for a middle-class woman undesirable. In her discussion of Jane Eyre, Newman demonstrates how Jane uses her paintings to capture Rochester's attention, a move that allows her to maintain her diffident demeanor while provocatively suggesting that there is more to her than meets the eye. In her discussion of the works of Eliot, Newman convincingly highlights the relationship between the subjectivity of the author and her literary production.

While Newman produces compelling and persuasive close readings of literary texts, she does not fulfill her own stated intent to historicize rigorously her analysis of female subjectivity. This is a particularly obvious in her discussion of the latter part of the Victorian period when she uses The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898 by the American writer Henry James, to suggest that the figure of the governess had become an anachronism in the age of the New Woman. It is important to remember that the Victorian period covered sixty years, a very long period of time in which there were considerable changes in the expectations and opportunities afforded to women. Her analysis of this later period would have been fruitfully enhanced by engaging with more recent scholarly studies that describe metropolitan life toward the end of the century as a consumerist spectacle of public display in which women fully participated. Two books come immediately to mind, Judith Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight (1992) with its emphasis on spectacle and urban spaces as dynamic zones of exchange and Erika Rappaport's Shopping for Pleasure (2000), which looks at the West End as a new and productive pleasurable space for women. Furthermore, the evangelical model of the ideal woman that Newman draws on was arguably more pervasive and powerful in the mid-Victorian period than later in the century.

Caveats aside, Subjects on Display is a thought-provoking contribution to the understanding of mid-Victorian femininity. It is to be hoped that historians will move beyond the challenge Newman's dense prose presents to engage fully with her emphasis on the pleasure that women could experience by consciously attracting attention and admiration—a fruitful and richly suggestive direction for cultural and social historians to explore further.