Reviewed by:

• Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of the Mind, 1770–1830 by Joanna Wharton
• Rita J. Dashwood (bio)

Anna Letitia Barbauld’s reading primer Lessons for Children, first pub lished in 1778, introduces the child to each month by forming an association between the said month and a particular sensory experience pertaining to that time of year. February, for example, is associated with the pleasant visual of the “Pretty white snow-drop, with a green stalk” (quoted on 44). Featuring a maternal figure who leads her child through his learning experiences by encouraging him to engage with the objects around him—such as by smelling the hay and tumbling in it—Barbauld’s work produces patterns of association, thus marking a departure from previous reading primers. Barbauld was deeply knowledgeable on philosophy of mind, exploring her topic through the writing of her educational books. Joanna Wharton’s new monograph brings to light such instances as this section from Lessons to convey the ways in which women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were pivotal to the pre-disciplinary development of psychological theory and practice. By uncovering aspects of these writers’ lives that help illuminate their works, Wharton offers a comprehensive picture of the impact women had in this field.

This book covers five authors: Barbauld, Honora Edgeworth, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Maria Edgeworth. All these women, as Wharton states, participated in debates concerning human consciousness and its relation to the material world, despite the challenge that this posed because of their gender: in the period in which they were writing, women were barred from universities, most radical dissenting academies, anatomy classes, and any access to the medical profession. Yet these women contributed with important works to the field of psychology. For the most part, these works have remained neglected. As Wharton explains with regard to Barbauld, previous work on this writer established a distinction between her children’s literature and the rest of her works, thus missing many of the intertextual links among them and depoliticizing her writing, which Wharton describes as “an intrinsically political act” (54). As Wharton affirms, it is important to emphasize that Barbauld’s writing and practice are demonstrative of her “belief in education as a means of bringing about political reform” (68). By offering a reconsideration of the educational writings of Barbauld and other authors, Wharton demonstrates the various contributions these women made to the political dialogue on education in this period and the field of psychology more broadly, despite the various gendered obstacles in their way. [End Page 317]

Writing a book on a set of authors united by their gender and, consequently, the distinctly gendered challenges they faced poses a pertinent question that Wharton addresses: Why group such women together when they held disparate views? Such a decision, as Wharton admits, goes directly against Maria Edgeworth’s protestation to Barbauld that “there is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among literary men” (quoted on 20), when the latter suggested the creation of a periodical written entirely by women, an idea Edgeworth rejected. Wharton addresses such potential methodological concerns by explaining that it is the disunity among the authors’ views, not their unity, that is of interest to her in this study. Wharton successfully accomplishes her aim of recovering a philosophical tradition to which women contributed with influential but often neglected work.

There is a story-telling quality to this text, as it expertly combines bio graphical research with textual analysis, to highlight aspects of these writers’ lives that were influential to their work. The interweaving of such contextualization with the textual analysis is an original aspect of this book, which provides new insights into these five authors’ works. By considering Honora Edgeworth’s practices and notebooks, for instance, Wharton frames the education and observation of her children as a scientific endeavour. Many of Honora Edgeworth’s plans never came into fruition, due to her unexpected death by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight. Her Practical Education; Or, The History of...

审核人：

• 物质启蒙：乔安娜·沃顿（Joanna Wharton），1770–1830年，女性作家与心灵科学
• 丽塔·达什伍德（Rita J.Dashwood）（生物）

安娜·莱蒂蒂亚·巴尔鲍德（Anna Letitia Barbauld）的儿童读物入门课，于1778年首次出版，通过在所述月份与一年中那个时期的特定感官体验之间建立联系，将孩子介绍给每个月。例如，二月与“漂亮的白色雪花，带有绿色的茎”（44引用）的愉悦视觉效果相关。Barbauld的作品以一个孕产妇为特征，通过鼓励孩子与周围的物体互动（例如，闻到干草并翻滚）来引导孩子学习，从而使他与孩子互动，从而标志着与以前的阅读入门背道而驰。巴尔博德（Barbauld）对心理哲学知识渊博，她通过撰写教育书籍来探索自己的话题。乔安娜·沃顿（Joanna Wharton）的新专着揭露了教训中的本节传达十八世纪末和十九世纪初女性作家在心理学理论和实践的学科前发展中起着关键作用的方式。沃顿商学院通过揭示这些作家生活中有助于阐明其作品的方面，提供了女性在这一领域所产生影响的全面描述。

这本书涵盖了五位作者：Barbauld，Honora Edgeworth，Hannah More，Elizabeth Hamilton和Maria Edgeworth。正如沃顿商学院所言，所有这些妇女都参加了有关人类意识及其与物质世界的关系的辩论，尽管这是由于其性别构成的挑战：在写作期间，妇女被禁止进入大学，最激进的反对的学院，解剖课以及任何进入医学界的机会。然而，这些妇女在心理学领域做出了重要贡献。在大多数情况下，这些作品仍然被忽略。如沃顿商学院对巴尔博德的解释，先前关于这位作家的著作将她的孩子的文学与其余作品区分开来，从而错过了他们之间的许多互文联系，并使她的写作非政治化，沃顿商学院将其描述为“一种内在的政治行为”（54）。正如沃顿商学院所肯定的那样，必须强调的是，巴尔博德的写作和实践都证明了她的“信仰教育是实现政治改革的一种手段”（68）。沃顿商学院对巴尔鲍德和其他作家的教育著作进行了重新思考，从而证明了这些妇女在这一时期以及更广泛的心理学领域对政治教育对话做出的各种贡献，尽管这些障碍阻碍了性别。[结束页317]

沃顿商学院致力于解决一整套有关性别问题的作家，因此面临着明显的性别挑战，这构成了沃顿商学院提出的一个相关问题：为什么当这些女性持有不同的观点时，她们会聚在一起吗？沃顿商学院承认，这样的决定直接反对玛丽亚·埃奇沃思（Maria Edgeworth）向巴尔博德（Barbauld）提出的抗议，即“文学女性之间，而不是文学男性之间，不存在工会的纽带”（引用于20），当时后者建议创建期刊。 Edgeworth完全由女性撰写，一个想法被拒绝了。沃顿商学院通过解释作者对此观点感兴趣的是作者观点中的分歧而不是他们的统一性，从而解决了这种潜在的方法论问题。

这本书具有讲故事的质量，因为它巧妙地将生物图形学研究与文本分析相结合，以突出显示这些作家生活中影响其作品的各个方面。这种语境化与文本分析的交织是本书的原始内容，它为这五位作者的作品提供了新的见解。例如，沃顿通过考虑Honora Edgeworth的做法和笔记本，将对孩子的教育和观察作为科学上的努力。Honora Edgeworth的许多计划都未实现，原因是她在28岁时因肺结核意外死亡。她的实践教育；或者，...的历史