Memory suffers from a doubly bad reputation: its status in empiricism as a mere static repository of ideas, and its identification with injury in our post- traumatic critical age. Eron makes a compelling case that the way memory works in the early novel repudiates both of these charges. Eighteenth-century fictions associate memory with mutability, she argues, and thereby with a “vitalizing and healing power” more typically attributed to creative imagination. Furthermore, consciousness in these works moves fluidly and feelingly across memory, imagination, and social cognition, contra empiricist categorizations and characterizations. Thought-provoking and occasionally revelatory close readings of five novels take center stage here. Eron’s brilliant reclamation of Bildung for female agency in Evelina is particularly noteworthy; also of note are illuminating tours of socially transacted, creatively reparative memory work in Tristram Shandy and Mansfield Park.Eron’s claims about memory engage primarily with philosophy of mind rather than neuroscience, but her argument draws key support from recent work on neuroplasticity and, especially, neural rewriting of memories. This research, which Eron discusses briefly in her introduction, has suggested specifically that memories cannot be recalled without some vulnerability to alteration, a result of the neural activity necessarily involved: for human brains, to remember is to activate, not merely to hold, a concept in the mind. Reminiscence thus becomes, as Eron rightly notes, an essentially creative process, in which memories do not merely supply materials for cognition, as empiricists supposed, but are themselves vital and in constant flux. For a psychologist like Daniel Schacter, to whom Eron refers, this constant re-creation of the past can be a source of “adaptive strength” rather than a maladaptive screen over the truth. Where Alan Richardson has criticized the adaptive memory stance for overlooking evident liabilities of false or fictional memory long known in the humanities, Eron, despite considering the same period, takes an even more bullish line than Schacter. She is partisan, consistently presenting examples of memory alterations that recast and soften traumatic pain or present threat, often explicitly or implicitly aimed against the Freudian tradition of trauma studies.The mechanism involved in memory’s reparation is often social in Eron’s readings; she thus contributes a compellingly novel element that may interest critics and psychologists alike. When Sterne’s Uncle Toby mixes his own traumatic memories of Namur with others’ histories, for example, the new points of association reduce the salience and intensity of his own history while superadding positive pleasures of sociability. Unlike in Freudian trauma, here it is truth—or overly faithful memory—that hurts, where reassociation alters and heals. Toby’s serially remodeled bowling green becomes, for Eron, both performance and metaphor of this vital recreation. Trim’s assistance represents the social agency involved, and its incumbent pleasures are signaled by the passing of a phallic pipe. Fanny’s East Room in Mansfield Park constitutes another notable metaphor of socially fictionalized, anti-empiricist memory. It offers no simple catalogue of memorabilia, but rather a remarkable illustration of Fanny’s willful overwriting of potentially painful past associations with (admittedly rather piteous) consolatory silver linings. In each instance—recontextualized quotations in Celestina offer another, albeit more ambiguous, case—Eron convincingly locates a subtly transformative and reparative will, not just repeated or occluded trauma, in memory’s recreations.The intermingling of memory with structures of affect, social cognition, and identity also supports readings less closely linked to this reparative project, including Eron’s truly standout analysis of Bildung in Evelina. Moving against materialist skepticisms about agency, Eron charts Evelina’s rise from thing to subject as a process of learning to divorce consciousness from both reactive sentimentality and reliance on others. Evelina’s Bildung, for Eron, suggests that fully agentic subjectivity must move beyond reflexive self-seeing, with its spatial conception of the self, to incorporate time: first, by learning to step back and take one’s time to judge; and second, by using that temporally reclaimed freedom to form new self-narratives that integrate imaginative prospection with remembered experience. The chapter provides a new framing for this previously published analysis, one in which Eron rather gesturally, but plausibly, suggests that Evelina’s “new kind of feminine virtue and agency” answers the linked threats of mindlessness and rape found in older “she-tragedies.” Other explorations of the minglings of self, other, past, and present occur throughout the book, ultimately turning reflexive when Eron casts the entire enterprise of novel-reading as yet another desire to remember “what never happened,” mixing our own pasts with pleasant fictions. An additional reflexive gesture takes Austen’s infamous unmaskings of her own authorial interpositions as a monitory reminder of how many of our own seemingly intentional actions may be similarly post-hoc authorial constructions. Perhaps for Eron, though, such reconstruction is exactly where agency inheres.While the fluid, “unpunctuated” version of mind articulated here does support some ingenious and persuasive close readings, that capaciousness also risks imprecision, leading at times to questionable moves. For one, even though empiricists, as Eron notes, often did not differentiate memory from knowledge, when memory is treated synonymously with learning as a whole, arguments for its adaptive power risk losing their force. Eron’s claims for “mind over matter” at times seem to court, only to avert, this potential pitfall, especially in her chapter on Robinson Crusoe. Eron points out that Crusoe’s projects succeed when memory acts in flexible concert with pure observation or imagination—fancy alone leads to monstrous canoes, empirical observation to Evelina-like reactive vulnerability. While Eron is right to note that memory’s role in ingenuity has been under-acknowledged in Crusoe, the point feels a little self-evident, until a later turn puts feeling into the mix to rescue it. Because Crusoe’s experience of time has been shaped by what past excitement caused him to retain and what present need spurs him to recall, his memory acts as a shaping force, not simply a container, of knowledge—a warped and warping clay pot. Feeling, through the unfaithful record of memory, shapes the links between past experience and present action that enable Crusoe’s survival.Eron’s review of philosophical treatises from Descartes to Hume in the book’s introduction is similarly bumpy. While it efficiently establishes her case for empiricism’s mistreatment of memory, this is often done at the expense of the full context of each thinker’s epistemology, and can feel tendentious. Moreover, what seems to be an error in chronology on page 16 places Locke’s Essay prior to Hobbes’s Leviathan. Perhaps the material in Eron’s “Afterthoughts,” which is both lyrical and elucidating, might have been better placed in the introduction: the current philosophical framing does not do justice to the appeal of her ideas.On the whole, Mind over Matter offers a refreshing and valuable intervention in memory studies, suggesting that when we inevitably mix fact and imagination, others’ pasts and our own, in a picturesque mélange of art and nature—the “pleasing landscape we wish to see”—we need not always fear such a fiction.