Sophia, and: Henrietta (review)

Scholarly editing engenders a sense of responsibility in the editor towards the work and its author, a desire to present the author’s work in a full and helpful manner so that other readers may find her work as satisfying as one has oneself. Norbert Schurer, in his critical edition of Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762), and Ruth Perry and Susan Carlile, in their critical edition of Lennox’s Henrietta (1758), clearly take that responsibility to heart. These editions are eminently readable, affordable, and accessible to undergraduate students encountering the eighteenth-century novel for the first time as well as to scholars of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the addition of Sophia and Henrietta to modern critical editions of Lennox’s Harriot Stuart, The Female Quixote, and Euphemia is a welcome one as it allows a modern reader to easily access all of Lennox’s major novels and appreciate her novels as a body of work.

Sophia, edited for the Broadview Editions Series (series editor Leonard Conolly), brings together the annotated text of the novel, an introduction, a chronology, a “Note on the Text,” textual variants, and appendices containing selections from contemporary documents that create a context in which to read the novel. The “Note on the Text” establishes the rationale for the choice of the two-volume edition of the novel published by James Fletcher in 1762 as the copy text for this edition in Lennox’s probable “involvement in the preparation” of the edition. The appendices range from materials detailing Lennox’s life, reviews of the novel, and selections from Lennox’s periodical, The Lady’s Museum, in which she first serialized Sophia, to essays on sentimentalism and moral philosophy, as Sophia is by far Lennox’s most overtly sentimental novel. In like manner, Henrietta, published in the University Press of Kentucky’s Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women Series (series editor Isobel Grundy), presents the second edition of the text of the novel, published in 1761 by the London printer Millar, since it was “probably corrected by Lennox.” The editors have annotated the text and included an introduction, chronology, and “Note on the Text,” as well as two appendices: the variants between the 1758 edition and the 1761 edition, and the corrections made to the 1761 edition by the present editors for the sake of clarity.

The editorial apparatus in both novels is useful without being obtrusive. Both novels are helpfully and fully annotated, a hallmark of Broadview Editions. In Sophia, annotations are especially useful in not only clarifying meaning but also suggesting connection. For example, a note on a character’s ignoring the play in order to socialize points out the commonplace nature of such behaviour and directs the reader to Burney’s Evelina, where the same behaviour is remarked upon by Burney’s heroine. Or, again, glossing Lennox’s use of the italicized “desarves” with a reminder of Henry Fielding’s Shamela, in which virtue in the hands of the novel’s loose heroine becomes “vartue.” These editions provide satisfying reading experiences, with much to mine in such appendices as “Female Property and Education,” “Rank and Titles,” “Clergy,” “British Currency,” and “Transportation.”

The introductions to both novels ably establish the nature of the literary marketplace at the time Lennox was writing Sophia and Henrietta, and, as most editions of lesser-known works do, they situate the novels within Lennox’s life, providing biographical detail, much of it gleaned from Miriam Rossiter Small’s biography of Lennox, originally published in 1935 and reissued by Archon Press in 1969, as well as from Duncan Isles’s edition of those letters by and to Lennox found in 1965 and published as “The Lennox Collection” in 1970 and 1971. The introduction to Sophia looks at the sentimental character of that novel and examines its serialization and reception...