Sensitive Witnesses: Feminist Materialism in the British Enlightenment by Kristin M. Girten (review)

The conversation between Enlightenment science and literature is now a familiar one. Francis Bacon's natural philosophy was taken up by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke but also by poets including Alexander Pope and James Thomson, whose imaginative elaboration of the new philosophy illuminates its dependence on figuration for representing the unknown. Girten complicates this cross-current by investigating how the women author-philosophers Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Smith redirected the investigative energies of science. Where Bacon's Enlightenment philosopher is a ‘modest witness’ (p. 2), detached from a nature over which he is master, Girten argues that these women writers are ‘sensitive witnesses’ more imbricated in and responsive to the material world.