THE CONVERSIONS OF EDWARD GIBBON

The noted feminist scholar scrutinizes the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).

Saxton died in 2023, leaving a manuscript that covers Gibbon’s whole life (1737-94) but clearly was intended to include a more sustained analysis of Decline and Fall than the intriguing snippets here; this published version’s final chapter ends with the sentence, “But Martha Saxton never intended this paragraph to be her epigraph on Gibbon’s life.” Thurman’s moving afterword explains that as her friend grappled with terminal cancer, she urged Saxton “not to revise but to keep pressing onward,” promising that she would edit the unfinished draft. The text we have focuses on the roots of the misogyny in Gibbon’s personal experience that was displayed in his masterwork, which was notably at odds with the Enlightenment thinkers he admired. Saxton paints a grim picture of his early years: neglected by a mother wrapped up in her needy, demanding husband, after her death in 1847 whipsawed by the self-dramatizing emotions and financial imprudence of his father. He took refuge in books, and Saxton’s comments on how the precocious boy’s early studies influenced his prose style and scholarly approach give a tantalizing preview of what a fully finished biography could have offered. Less interesting is her lengthy exegesis of Gibbon’s ambivalent romance with Suzanne Curchod; the “arrested capacity for love” she attributes to his childhood traumas certainly informed Gibbon’s problems with women—and his jaundiced portraits of Roman empresses—but has less obvious relevance to Decline and Fall’s conclusion that a root cause of the Roman Empire’s failure was decadence and eroding moral fiber. Saxton’s biting exposure of the disconnect between Gibbon’s unblinking support for British imperialism and political corruption, even as he condemned these same qualities in ancient Rome, is a stronger thread running through later chapters on his undistinguished parliamentary career.

A capable short biography, deprived by Saxton’s premature death of the enrichment that would have made it special.