Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (review)

104 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 7:1 introduction to the novel, Radcliffe opens up Burke's sublime so that it becomes "a democratic experience, since all people can respond to the beauties of creation" (p. xii). With access to the sublime, women in Radcliffe's novel redefine how its power might best be used and thereby challenge the traditional associations of passivity with weakness and control with strength. For Milbank, Madame becomes active and effective because she is open to the force of the sublime. "Her weakness is then transformed into power, whereas the Duke's refusal to accept a position of vulnerability makes him unable to benefit" (p. xvii). Finally, Milbank sees the novel as overturning a number of patriarchal staples, including the denial of the mother, in an attempt to create "a female self of value" (p. xxiii). These three new volumes illustrate the ways that including women's voices in the canon challenges us to transform our understanding of entire literary fields. Perhaps in our re-examination of eighteenth-century fiction, Edgeworth and Radcliffe will no longer be classed as "major-minors" because, in the literary community these authors help to create, the term itself will no longer have meaning. Kathryn Kirkpatrick Appalachian State University Nicola J. Watson. Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. 220pp. $56.50. ISBN 0-19-811297-1. Nicola J. Watson's book, with its tantalizing subtitle, attempts to map "a range of new narrative models in response" to the "politicization of sentimental discourse, on the part of radicals, liberals, and conservatives alike" (p. 2) during the period after the French Revolution . According to Watson's account, letters are intercepted and seductions interrupted, both intra- and extra-textually. In the years "following the euphoria engendered by the fall of the Bastille in 1789" (p. 2), the effusiveness of epistolary fiction is transformed by novelists ranging from Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Lady Sydney Morgan, Charles Maturin, and James Hogg to Lady Caroline Lamb, among others, into the more distanced third-person narrative. Watson contends that novelistic form is linked to "changes in political , cultural, and ideological structures" (p. 21) and that the "novel of the 1790s ... obsessed with revolution and its failures," becomes "preoccupied above all with projects of recuperation, conversion, and purgation of that great cataclysm" in the early decades of the new century (p. 20). Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825 joins a number of books that have appeared in the last year which centre on the impact of the French Revolution on British novelists. These include Gary Kelly's Women, Writing, and Revolution, 17901827 (1993), Chris Jones's Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (1993), and my own Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Writers of the 1790s (1993). All these works are engaged in revising our notion of the period which had, until recently, been dominated by the so-called "great" writers of the romantic tradition. Rediscovering novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Smith, and others, these critics redefine the moment in history which Virginia Woolf thought was of "greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses." Of these four books which use diverse methodological approaches, Watson's deals with the greatest number of authors. Her focus on letter writing, the effects of reading and misreading, and sentimental exchanges, while not allowing her to analyse any text closely or to discuss REVIEWS 105 in detail the development of a particular author, does permit her to pursue engaging trajectories about epistolary strategies, meaning making, and sentimental plots in works by writers of differing ideological backgrounds. A compelling element in the book is its tracing of the influence of Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse in British novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Watson suggests that recasting the plot of Rousseau's novel was one way of coming to terms with the Revolution and its philosophies: "despite almost universal condemnation after 1789 for its immoral tendencies ... [Rousseau's] novel usefully suffers from a radical ambiguity, strung as it is between a powerful validation of individual...