ELIZABETH FAY is professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has published several books, including Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal and A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism.
Fay s book, in which solid scholarship is very well organized and elegantly presented, is incontestably successful in analyzing the notion of congruence in eighteenth-century material culture. Her research is splendidly documented, and her grasp of the complexities of contexts firm. Perhaps the most commendable aspects of Fay s ambitious and sophisticated study is her original synthesis (she uses an impressive variety of sources and is fluent in several discourses), the extraordinary diversity of portraitive practices she considers, and her ability to remain focused on the concept of congruence (in the same way she remained focused on the collaborative model developed in her study on Wordsworth) in order to complicate, indeed reconfigure, our understanding of identity construction in the eighteenth-century commodified culture. Fay s powerful and scrupulous analysis also places her name in the company of influential scholars devoted to complicating the gendered divisions of private and public, such as Paula McDowell, Amanda Vickery, Lawrence Klein, Judith Pascoe, and others. Written with an admirable sensitivity to complicated cultural nuances, Fay s book undoubtedly represents a timely and valuable contribution to the always intriguing field of eighteenth-century studies. The Journal of British Studies"
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