Sentimental fiction: ethics, social critique and philanthropy

Finance, Fiction, and Loss

Reviewed by: Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction by Alex Wetmore Amelia Dale Alex Wetmore, Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Touching Fiction (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2013). Pp. 207. $95.00. Eighteenth-century printed texts are notoriously self-aware about the circumstances of their production and dissemination. The relationship between self-reflexivity and literary form has been explored by such figures as Christina Lupton, Deidre Lynch, Christopher Flint, and Tom Keymer, among others. Alex Wetmore argues for the congruity between the printed bodies of sentimental books and the mechanized men of feeling presented within their pages. Sentimentalism’s stress on embodied emotive expression is crucially related to the eighteenth century’s [End Page 547] preoccupation with the physicality of the book; print’s palpability becomes crucial to its capacity to elicit emotion. The subtitle, Touching Fiction, refers to how sentimental fictions deploy tactility in order to become emotionally and allegorically “touching.” The cover illustration, an anonymous etching with engraving titled “High life at noon” (1769), portrays a man touching a woman’s breast amidst a scene of literary and appetitive consumption. It suggests another, more sexual connotation of “touching fiction.” Yet Wetmore’s interest is not so much in the sexual practices of the men of feeling, but in the way feeling is inscribed on sensible bodies, and what it means to touch, and be touched by, sentimental fiction. What I found especially interesting was the study of sentimentalism’s “touching” of bodies via book-like bodies and bodies in books. This speaks to one of the most fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century writing: its playful coalescence of signifying flesh and printed paper. Sentimental novels by Henry Brooke, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, and Henry Mackenzie are the focus of Men of Feeling. Wetmore introduces a useful term, “corporeal defamiliarization,” to denote how sentimental novels denaturalize their status as touchable book-objects. The phrase also encompasses sentimentalism’s preoccupation with bodies of texts, and bodies in texts. Wetmore compellingly argues that sentimental self-consciousness can be understood to have the matter of the book and the body at its fraught center. Sentimental self-reflexivity, therefore, is not the metafictional, proto-postmodern irony that our moment in history might tempt us to identify it as being. The book is structured around three lengthy chapters, each with a title composed of two competing, interrelating terms. In the first of these sections, “Body/Language,” Wetmore explores the relationship between sentimental self-reflexivity and eighteenth-century theories of language. Though sentimental fiction, as is often noted, draws attention to the limitations of writing and speech in favor of an embodied articulation of emotion, it is far from naïve in its treatment of bodily expression. It remains alert to the way bodily signs mirror lexical and linguistic structures. Wetmore’s argument is convincing, particularly when considering how in Tristram Shandy the language of the body is as fraught, and as susceptible to failure and miscommunication, as the words that the characters speak and write. Arguing from a different perspective in “Tristram Shandy and the Wound of Language” (1995), Ross King contends that the impotent, ailing male bodies in the novel are constitutive to the failure of language that pervades the book. In a narrative that entangles literary expression with sexual prowess, linguistic failure and sexual impotence become inextricable. Sentimental fiction might privilege embodied expression, but it is as skeptical about interpreting the body as it is about reading the page. In the subsequent section, “Feeling/Machines,” Wetmore argues that the automaton is central to sentimental fiction’s self-awareness. The feeling body of the sentimental man, marked by print and experience, becomes analogous to the mechanically reproduced book. Wetmore notes how ideal, sentimental, masculine virtue is repeatedly characterized as involving mechanized, automatic affective responses. The following section, “Public/Health,” investigates relationships between sentimental novels’ preoccupation with their own physicality, and books of “physick.” Wetmore suggests that sentimental fiction’s corporeal defamiliarization works in tandem with the genre’s palliative goal of expanding and extending nervous sensibilities. Following Henry Fielding in The Author’s Farce (1730), Wetmore [End Page 548] plays on the suggestive congruities between hacks and quacks. Sentimentalism’s fraught...

Personal Effects and Sentimental Fictions Deidre Lynch Sentimental novels are cluttered with things. The emotional attachments that people form with possessions in these mid-eighteenth-century fictions can seem as freighted with consequence as the emotional attachments that people form with each other. Indeed, modem readers of Henry Brooke's The Fool ofQuality or Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey might be pardoned for finding it hard to distinguish one sort of relationship from the other—even if normal notions of the folly of fetishism predispose us to believe that the difference between, say, ownership and friendship is a difference worth preserving. The keepsakes that clutter sentimental fiction (the lockets that protagonists wear next to their hearts; the sleeve buttons or snuffboxes that pairs of characters exchange to memorialize their first meeting or last, teary-eyed parting) work instead to collapse that difference. While they instructed their readers in emotional responsiveness, sentimentalists were more than ready to make objects of this variety—objects particularly valued because they are the surrogates for particular persons—their props. This practice marks the novelists' fashion-consciousness. On the testimony of the OED, which dates the word keepsake to 1790, it was only in the eighteenth century that keepsakes came to be identified as a distinct kind of material good. The fact that by 1790 members ofthe propertied classes had learned to want to give and to receive keepsakes from one another bespeaks the reciprocal influence EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 346 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION between eighteenth-century people's love affair with feelings, and their fascination with the new opportunities for acquisitiveness that they discovered in shops. And that new readiness to countenance superfluous expenditure that historians of this century's "consumer revolution" have recognized— people's new willingness to disregard the traditional association between luxury and vice and instead value the luxury good as a vehicle for the finer feelings—also lies behind the marketability throughout the era of a literature designed to procure for its readers the "luxury of tears."1 Writers such as Henry Brooke, Laurence Steme, Henry Mackenzie, and Sarah Scott vindicated the psychology of refinement suitable to the new consumer culture not only by finding increasingly nuanced ways of discriminating human emotions, but also by exemplifying the diversity of the portable properties that humans might feel emotional with or about. Hence the clutter. Sensibility is both the capacity to feel as others do and, as one eighteenth-century definition maintains, that "peculiar ... habitude of mind, which disposes a man to be easily moved, and powerfully affected by surrounding objects."2 The (only semi-) satiric imitator of Sterne who takes a "Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge" knows he should let nothing (no thing) "escape" him: "The traveller ... should extract reflections out of a cabbage stump." Satirists were quick to note that sentimentalism invited people to be (in the standard phrase) "tremblingly alive" to dead matter.3 Such satires of sentimental animism had a point. A carriage for hire that sits alone and "unpitied" in an inn yard in Calais is able to arouse in Sterne's Parson Yorick the sense ofobligation he had been unable to muster in his earlier encounter with the Franciscan friar. "Much indeed was not to be said for it—but something might—and when a few words will rescue misery out of her distress, I hate the man who can be a churl of them."4 It seems apt that Yorick's piteous words acknowledge his obligation to a désobligeant—that they personify a carriage that seats one person only. It is as if the communicative and emotive powers that sentimentalism 1 On sensibility and consumer culture see G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture ofSensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2 "Question: Ought Sensibility to be Cherished or Repressed?" Monthly Magazine 2 (October 1796), quoted in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 5. 3 Thomas Hood, "A Sentimental Journey from Islington to Waterloo Bridge," first published in the London Magazine, 1821; reprinted in Sterne...

<i>The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England</i>. Edited by Mark Blackwell . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 365.

<i>The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought</i> , ed. Frans De Bruyn

The Political Novel and the Seduction Plot: Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives Katherine Binhammer Spurred by the July 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution, critics of English literature have turned in large numbers to the study of fiction from the 1790s.1 The genealogy of the recent critical attention to 1790s fiction can be traced, in part, to our current 1990s interest in the way political meaning functions in the literary text. The impact of new historicism and cultural studies on literary criticism has led scholars to reconsider the interconnection between literature and politics, and the 1790s provide fertile ground for this work. The explicitly feminist novels ofMary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Charlotte Smith, for example, seem pregnant with material for those of us engaged in studying the dissemination of political and gender ideologies through literature.2 Why is it, then, that 1 Recent essay collections dedicated to issues of representation in the 1790s include Reflections on Revolution: Images ofRomanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 1993); Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991); Revolution and English Romanticism, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Seiden (New York: StMartin's Press, 1990); The French Revolution andBritish Culture, ed. Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and The Novels ofthe 1790s, ed. Linda Lang-Peralta (forthcoming). 2 For a sampling of this recent feminist criticism see Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women , Politics and the Fiction ofLetters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, Revolution: 1790-1827 (Oxford: ClarenEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 2, January 1999 206 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Thomas Holcroft's feminist novel, Anna St. Ives (1792), has been marginalized by some and wholly ignored by other critics participating in the revisioning of 1790s fiction?3 Is it because the women writers from this period, in their combination of the textual and the personal, are too seductive to resist? Is it the problematic issue of men in feminism that keeps critics away? Or is the overtdidacticism ofHolcroft's novel responsible for its lack of popularity? In this essay, I will advance the case for the importance ofAnna St. Ives to a feminist literary history of the novel at the end of the eighteenth century. My argument is not grounded in a qualitativejudgment ofthe text's canonical greatness; rather, I am suggesting thatAnna St. Ives, as arguably the first Jacobin novel, can teach us a lot about how politics and the novel became inextricably linked through the seduction plot in the revolutionary decade.4 In herexcellentbookEquivocalBeings: Politics, Gender, andSentimentality in the 1 790s (1995), Claudia Johnson analyses the profound interplay between sentimental fiction and political debates in the decade. She argues that sentimental discourse merged with the language of politics—for example, in Burke's Reflections—such that the language of the heart and the narratives of sentimental fiction were invested with either a revolutionary or counter-revolutionary meaning. The frequent analogies appearing both in the fiction and the political tracts which linked the state of the nation to the state of the family explicitly underscore the imbrication of politics and sentimental affective relations.5 As Johnson succinctly points out, "During the 1790s ... sentimentality is politics made intimate."6 Sentimental fiction played out the revolutionary debates in the arena of the don Press, 1993); Eleanor Ty, The Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form ofthe British Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 3 Anna St. Ives is included in the major early studies of the 1790s political novel—for example, Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel: 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). But few contemporary critics, particularly feminist critics, show any interest in, or familiarity with, the text. 4 In her classic study, The Popular Novel in England (London: Constable, 1932), J.M.S. Tompkins designates Anna St. Ives "the first full-blown...

212 volume’s disobliging price may be forbidding . Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock University of Göttingen PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS. Novel Beginnings : Experiments in EighteenthCentury English Fiction. New Haven and London: Yale, 2006. Pp. ix ⫹ 309. $33. This wide-ranging yet beautifully focused survey of the novel explores its varieties without assuming realism, or indeed any other quality, to be its generic goal. Ms. Spacks acknowledges categorization as a necessary artifice for the critic, and the loose, interconnected categories she employs—novels of adventure , development, consciousness, sentiment, manners, gothicism, and politics —allow for a roughly chronological progression through the century’s fiction without ever becoming restrictive. The emphasis throughout is on unusual juxtapositions of novels, and on a thorough integration of the famous with the less known, and of the works of male and female writers. The scope and swift pace leave little room for close attention to verbal texture or tone, but her telling details still convey the novels’ life. Plot remains (as it is in her Desire and Truth) one of Ms. Spacks’s central concerns, and many summaries here that might be tedious in other hands are lively. Discussing differences of narrative pace often ignored, she illustrates divergent practices that flourished when narrative conventions were still unsettled. She appreciates bold experiments usually given scant attention in literary histories , such as Barker’s ‘‘psychologically tantalizing’’ stories that deliberately refuse explanation, or the unusual drama of Sarah Fielding’s The Cry, in which consciousness is not rendered, as in Richardson or Sterne, but ‘‘contemplated .’’ Particularly acute on sentimental fiction, Ms. Spacks dismisses the usual moralizing of passive or active response in favor of an aesthetic pleasure in harmonious patterns of experience and emotion. A concluding chapter on Tristram Shandy shows how its exploitation of and challenge to the ways of previous novelists illustrate how much in the way of fictional conventions the experimental genre had already produced—and adds that those conventions, far from being fixed, were continually being reshaped by all practitioners. An Afterword on the nineteenth-century novel points out what riches it inherited from the previous century, but refuses a narrative of generic improvement. The nineteenth-century novel settled down, Ms. Spacks suggests, but what it gained in maturity and consistency it lost in urgency, variety, and exuberance, the qualities so brilliantly celebrated here. Jane Spencer University of Exeter JUDITH BROOME. Fictive Domains: Body, Landscape, and Nostalgia, 1717– 1770. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2007. Pp. 191. $43. Given the sense of loss that suffuses eighteenth-century writing, it is surprising how little critical attention has been paid to nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon . This gap has only recently begun to be addressed, most prominently by Aaron Santesso’s study of mid-century poetry, A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia (2006). Ms. Broome’s project rests on the observation that ‘‘the cultural nostalgia that pervaded the eighteenth century—a nameless longing—manifested itself in cultural constructions of body and land- ...

Hernandez, Alex Eric. <i>The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering</i>.

In this ambitious and original study, Lynn Festa examines how and why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of representing British and French relations with colonial populations in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Festa shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of identity in an age of empire. Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self. Placed in conversation with empire, however, sentimentality invites both psychological and cultural readings of the encounter between self and other. Sentimental texts, Festa claims, enabled readers to create powerful imagined relations to distant people. Yet these emotional bonds simultaneously threatened the boundaries between self and other, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. Festa argues that sentimental tropes and figures allowed readers to feel for others, while maintaining the particularity of the individual self. Sentimental identification thus operated as a form of differentiation as well as consolidation. Festa contends that global reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp during this era. Sentimentality became an important tool for writers on empire, allowing conquest to be portrayed as commerce and scenes of violence and exploitation to be converted into displays of benevolence and pity. Above all, sentimental texts used emotion as an important form of social and cultural distinction, as the attribution of sentience and feeling helped to define who would be recognized as human.

When the Personal Doesn’t Become the Political Michelle Massé (bio) Further Responses to Marianne Noble on Stowe, Sentiment, and Masochism In “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Marianne Noble examines the “sentimental wound,” “a bodily experience of anguish caused by identification with the pain of another.” The wound ostensibly serves as the occasion to heal the breach between people, but can instead become a suppurating injury we take pleasure in probing. In Part I of her essay, Noble argues that the wound “represents a critique of abstract, disembodied notions of personhood” (296), a critique implicitly associated not only with nineteenth-century abolitionism, but with feminism, which also seeks “political transformation through feelings” (295). In Part II, she emphasizes how the wound also can “function as a mechanism for transforming raw violence into ecstatic stimulation” (297), a stimulation, Noble asserts, that is self-gratifying to white women, but which has very little to do with the actual tortured bodies of black people. The vicissitudes of sympathy bring her to conclude that sympathy is “a dangerous form of political thought; but . . . a lack of sympathy is more dangerous” (314). Like Elizabeth Barnes, I appreciate Noble’s analysis of Stowe’s “real presence,” which lets us know the “embodied, affective personhood” of others through “intuition, imagination, and sympathetic responses” (302, 295), her emphasis upon the importance of “real bodies,” and her scepticism about what we might call sentimental feminism, whether in the nineteenth century or today, a sentimentalism that assumes women are “naturally” moral and caring. 1 In reading and re-reading the essay, I find myself engaged by Noble’s general topics: the importance of the “presymbolic voice” (302) in sentimental fiction and the ways in which an appeal based on empathy with pain can become yoked to a masochistic pleasure in pain. I also find myself confused, however, by the larger implications of Noble’s line of reasoning. In thinking through the differences between my own and Noble’s readings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, specifically, and of masochism, more generally, it seems to me that there is a dissolution of interpretive boundaries and frames within the essay itself that uncannily mirrors the shifting self/other borders she sets out to examine in interpersonal relations. Early and later psychological developmental stages become conflated as Noble traces the paths of masochistic desire that lead to white identification with black suffering in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Gradations in identification blur into a non-specific “intertwining with the other” (313): neither the eighteenth century’s careful calibration of empathy, sympathy, and compassion, nor modern psychoanalysis’s equally fine distinctions among incorporation and identification, mirroring and merging, are used to suggest degrees of rapport. Levels of representation conflate: there seems to be little difference between someone being whipped—or watching someone being whipped—in a novel and “real” life, or between the “gut feeling” (302) of a reader, the represented agony of a character being beaten, and actual pain. Finally, then, what Noble calls the “anti-individualistic” epistemology of sympathy begins to seem anti-individual in discussion, as characters and readers become aggregate creatures generating predictable responses according to sex, race, and kind of “wound.” And much of this seems at odds with Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself, which questions the adequacy of “right feeling” and represents [End Page 154] the subordinate, whether black or female, as no less capable of sadism than the dominant. The essay’s insistence upon pre-Oedipal or pre-Symbolic merger as the guarantor for what psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin calls “intersubjectivity” is troubling (e.g., 301, 302, 303, 306). Noble draws extensively upon Benjamin’s key concept, which designates the reciprocal ability “to recognize that other subject as different and yet alike.” 2 Noble’s linking of “intersubjective, non-individuated identities” (295) thus strikes me as a contradiction in terms, and at odds with my own understanding of Benjamin: we can only recognize the other as a subject or self because we are individuated. As Noble herself points out, reunion with “a mother who represents pure plenitude . . . necessarily entails the destruction of individual life, since it eradicates the boundaries of individuality” (307). How, then, does...

Given what Ian Watt long ago identified as the novel's generic emphasis on personal relationships and “private” life, almost all fiction might in some respect be classified as domestic (1957,The Rise of the Novel). But the term refers to a prominent subgenre, largely Anglo‐American (with cultural roots in evangelical Protestantism), which emerged in the eighteenth century with Samuel Richardson'sPamela(1740) and came to full flowering in the mid‐nineteenth century. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott are well‐known domestic authors; domestic fictions by these and a host of lesser‐known writers were published in book form and proliferated, as serial and short fiction, in numerous widely read periodicals (seeserialization). Associated with the rise of female authorship (although male writers, e.g., Nathaniel Hawthorne, also wrote domestic fiction) and a female literary readership as well as the increasing respectability of the novel as literary form, domestic transforms domestic incident into plot, centering on the home and family—not only as the sphere that launches the hero, as in thebildungsromanorpicaresquenovel, but as the locus of significant narrative action; domestic fiction invests the seeming “trifles” of daily domestic life with profound emotional and cultural value (Tompkins, chap. 6). Giving fictional form to the culturally‐and historically‐specific organization of personal life known as “domesticity” (a particular model of the privatized, middle‐CLASS, nuclear family) and to the gendered spatial and social divisions between public and private that defined Victorian society, domestic fiction centered on women; indeed, this literature's emergence coincided with the “rise of the domestic woman,” a moral exemplar and embodiment of “feminine” domestic virtues of modesty, chastity, frugality, sympathy, and selfless devotion to family (Armstrong, chap. 2; seegender). While domestic texts could be comic, even satiric, in tone, many were strongly inflected by evangelical Protestantism's vision of the special moral authority and “influence” of middle‐class women; domestic fiction of this type (often called “sentimental fiction”) played a key role in abolitionism and other early nineteenth‐century movements for social reform. While most accounts identify the waning of domestic fiction after 1870, scholars have traced its sustained relevance within the modernist era and beyond (seemodernism), especially among a diverse group of women writers in Britain and America; others detect its imprint on postcolonial novelists’ politically charged portrayals of “home.”

When Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon was published in 1997, it marked a deep shift in Pynchon's career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchon's novels had been socially and politically aware: V., Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland are all marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor; Pynchonesque has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns - and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the military-industrial complex, which may or may not, according to Pynchon's wild and widely populated casts of characters, be the definitive feature of America. In short, Pynchon's novels were preeminently postmodern. Mason & Dixon moved beyond postmodernism to use the same style, wit, and erudition to re-create an eighteenth century when America was being formed as both the and the idea we have come to know. Pynchon's focus on the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line and the governmental and scientific entities responsible for it makes a clearer statement than any of his previous novels about the slavery and imperialism at the heart of the Enlightenment, and Mason & Dixon levels a dark and hilarious critique at this America. novel was a New York Times bestseller. ~~ This volume of new essays studies the interface between eighteenth- and twentieth-century culture both in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchon's work, not only because it deals with his most recent novel, but also because the contributors take up the linkages between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in studies that are as concerned with culture as with the literary text itself. ~~ scope of the volume is indicated by its four sections: The Rounds of History, about historiography and narrative temporality; Consumption Then and Now, which deals with slavery, trade, and consumption; Space and Power, which confronts the connections between place and imperial power in the eighteenth century; and Enlightenment Microhistories, which studies in detail three specific eighteenth-century incidents. ~~~~~~~ ELIZABETH JANE WALL HINDS is Professor of English at College at Brockport, State University of New York.

A traditional bias that persists within scholarship on Edith Wharton's canon praises her as a realist, citing works from the first half of her career to support that categorization while dismissing many of her later works as regrettable "lapses" into sentimentality. Hildegard Hoeller's innovative study, Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction, addresses that persistent bias by considering evidence of the sentimental mode in her work, while simultaneously exploring how Wharton employs that sentimental voice to engage in self-referential dialogue and critique of the realist voice. Hoeller's study thoughtfully and effectively compels us to re-examine Wharton's oeuvre in light of this neglected area, and it raises useful questions about continuing critical resistance to the sentimental in literary scholarship as a whole.

The Introduction provides an overview of some of the social, legal, and economic developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that caused the trope of female flight to resonate especially strongly with audiences of the period—developments such as the rise of the companionate marriage ideal that led to more women defying their parents’ wishes and running off with partners of their choosing; family law reforms that expanded the rights of women who chose to run away from their husbands; advancements in transportation technology that allowed women to relocate with increasing speed and anonymity, etc.. It also outlines the book’s theoretical and organizational methodologies, and provides summaries of the seven chapters that move, in roughly chronological order, through a variety of literary genres in which the runaway-woman figure played a leading role: amatory fiction, sentimental fiction, gothic fiction, the novel of manners, provincial fiction, sensation fiction, and New Woman fiction.

Antoinette Marie Sol. Textual Promiscuities: Eighteenth-Century Critical Rewriting (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2002). Pp. 243. $43.50. Aurora Wolfgang. Gender and Voice in the French Novel, 1730–1782 (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004). Pp. 209. $89.95. Due to its sentimentality and letter form, Lettres portugaises was originally believed to have been penned by a woman. When it was discovered to have been written by a man, it revealed to a shocked public that a man can indeed write very convincingly as a woman. A reconsideration of style, genre, and gender on the part of seventeenth and eighteenth-century contemporaries thus led to the conclusion that male writers, emulating the voice of women writers, could gain equal acclaim. Male writers consequently imitated women's successful letter collections, epistolary novels, and other first-person narratives, emphasizing emotion and sentiment rather than reason and linear narration. The full extent of this interchangeability can be witnessed in Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux's La vie de Marianne (1731–41), a first-person novel written in a feminine style, which was completed in 1750 by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, who was ironically imitating the voice of a man imitating the voice of a woman. Success of Marivaux's novel, alongside the sensational popularity of Lettres portugaises, demonstrated that replication of women's writing was not only possible but immensely profitable. Textual Promiscuities by Antoinette Marie Sol and Gender and Voice in the French Novel by Aurora Wolfgang both examine the phenomenon of the imitation of "feminine" writing, which occurred throughout the eighteenth century. Women's writing flourished as a consequence of the fashion of feminine sensibility, [End Page 137] witness the prominence of Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, Riccoboni's Lettres de Fanni Butlerd, Lettres de Mylady Juliette Catesby, and Charrière's Lettres de Mistress Henley. Sol and Wolfgang examine these and other authors and develop discussions initiated in past decades by such scholars as Joan DeJean, Dena Goodman, Nancy Miller, and Joan Hinde Stewart. Antoinette Marie Sol acknowledges the importance novels had in Enlightenment dialogues, especially between genders and nations. Her critical study of female influences on Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses examines the themes and impact of French author Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni and British writer Frances Burney. In attempting to differentiate her work from Harold Bloom's concepts of influence, Sol diverges in semantics—with terms like "discursive community," "textual relationship," and "dialogical relationship" (22)—but not in concepts. Sol's compelling argument complements previous studies on salon-style arenas; yet, she suggests that authors like Laclos, who could not participate in salons, used instead the public forum as their "social laboratory" (18). It is, however, a disappointment that Sol does not clarify why some authors used publication instead of salons as a means of testing ideas. Nonetheless, for Sol the "triangulation of these authors" imparts a better understanding of Laclos as a "critical reader" (22), culling ideas and concepts from both women's novels, thereby pitting both libertine and sentimental modes against each other. Sol suggests that Laclos's work draws on the humor of Burney as well as the sensibility of Riccoboni, the coquetry of Burney's characters as well as the libertinism decried in Riccoboni's novels. Further influenced by his female counterparts, Laclos approaches themes concerning social critique, sexuality, class, and patriarchy. Sol not only outlines possible parallels and similarities, she also considers larger structures created through character-types, style, and the depiction of society, thereby substantiating her claim for the influence of women's literary tradition. Yet, Sol argues, even critics aware of Laclos's debt have revealed their own "anxiety" regarding feminine influence on masculine works; they "seem either to ignore the fact that [these novels] were written by women or apologize for the temporary lack of taste and lapse of judgment on the part of a normally skillful writer and critic" (37). To remedy this disregard Sol focuses...