Out-of-print Victorian feminist worth a second read

A Victorian feminist with crypto-Jewish ancestors, Grace Aguilar couldn't be dismissed easily by contemporary male critics, which made her such an effective voice for Jewish women in 19th-century England. And it's what makes a new collection of her long-out-of-print works an intriguing read today.

"Grace Aguilar, Selected Writings," edited by Michael Galchinsky tells the story of an artist struggling beneath Victorian social barriers, with helpful essays that bring Aguilar's work into context.

Aguilar made large, and generally unknown, contributions to Jewish enlightenment and emancipation, combating stereotypes by her life and example. In her short, 31-year life (1816-1847), she was the first to write a history of the English Jews, she became a prominent spokesperson for both women's and Jewish rights, and she inspired Jewish reform in her country.

Through her essays, poetry and fiction, she expressed the frustrations and aspirations of the Anglo-Jewish woman. But she did so with feminine, Victorian delicacy so that male critics could neither fully accept, nor reject her. In the end, her delicate steps proved groundbreaking, which is clearly how she wanted it.

Discussing the subtle power of the Victorian wife, Aguilar writes: "If she has really a great mind, she will know how to influence, without in any way interfering. She will know how to serve the Lord in her household without neglecting her duty and affection towards her husband; and by domestic conduct influence society at large, secretly and unsuspectedly indeed, but more powerfully than she herself can in the least degree suppose."

Aguilar's kind of feminism might be hard for modern readers to digest at first. A quick glance at her romantic and domestic fiction articulating a need for the separate, but equal, if not more important "woman's sphere," is easy to dismiss as too conventional, even in a more restrained era. But Galchinsky's collection gives a broader look at Aguilar's career and life.

The portrait of a courageous, leading voice for female and Jewish emancipation emerges from her texts. The very guise in which Aguilar calls for woman's equality, which first appears frustratingly muted, serves to illustrate what it was like for this passionate, Victorian Jewish woman on the ending cusp of the enlightenment, trying to effect some positive change in what she believed were flawed surroundings.

Educated by Sephardic parents who escaped to England from Portugal, where their ancestors practiced Judaism in secret, Aguilar began her intellectual career at a young age. Her first book, "The Magic Wreath," was published when she was 19. Like the romantic, Proustian portrait of the artist, she was ill most of her life, never married and kept writing until her death.

Discussing her work and her life in his essay "Modern Jewish women's dilemmas: Grace Aguilar's bargains," Galinsky writes:

"Grace Aguilar... attempted to strike bargains, both with Christians, and with Jewish men. If Christians would tolerate Jews, Aguilar agreed that Jews would keep their different practices within the domestic sphere. Similarly, if Jewish men would provide women in the community with the education they lacked, women would agree to restrict their use of this education to training children in the home."

In the fictional stories "The Perez Family" and "The Escape," Aguilar sticks to a popular romantic literary genre. Her characters are static and sentimental, but Aguilar uses this convention to express some less-than-popular ideas of her own. Her leading ladies are the intellectual centers of the family, as well as gallant heroines who rescue loved ones from burning homes or the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition. In addition, she describes the contemporary anti-Semitic climate and issues of Jewish assimilation into British society.

In "Women of Israel," Aguilar uses a typically male form of literature, the midrash, to discourse on women in the Torah. About Deborah, she writes one of her more openly feminist descriptions:

"Had there been the very least foundation for the supposition of the degrading and heathenizing of the Hebrew female, we should not find the offices of prophet, judge, military instructor, poet, and sacred singer, all combined and all perfected in the person of a woman: a fact clearly and almost startlingly illustrative of what must have been their high and intellectual training..."

One can only wonder what would have become of Aguilar and her career had she lived a little longer. Her final journal entrees printed for the first time in Galchinsky's collection reveal a darker mood -- an artist clinging to life and to a God that seemed to be abandoning her.

"Grace Aguilar, Selected Writings" reveals the difficulties, and triumphs, of a brilliant young writer living in a restrictive society. Although Aguilar died prematurely, it is easy to see that her successes were great and her life an unusual one.

"Grace Aguilar, Selected Writings," edited by Michael Galchinsky (415 pages, Broadview Press, $17.95 paperback).