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268 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 3:3 If this biography does not read as smoothly as others, it is only because it refuses to oversimplify its subject or to pretend that the information available to us is anything other than fragmentary. In fully accepting the limitations within which he had to work, Park Honan has written a remarkable biography that will stand us in good stead for many years to come. Julia Prewitt Brown Boston University Syndy McMillen Conger, ed. Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990. 235pp. US$36.50. The OED gives a now well-known passage from one of Lady Bradshaigh's many letters to Samuel Richardson as the earliest example of the use of the adjective "sentimental": "What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite. ... Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word. ... I am frequently astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk." The quotation remains a good guide to both the awkwardness and the importance of those capacities for "feeling" that "the polite" were learning to cultivate. It is difficult to know how earnest or how amused we should find Lady Bradshaigh's puzzlement. In her letter the word "sentimental" is at once comprehensive and merely voguish; the range of its applications is either intriguingly wide or stupidly unlimited. A sense of such difficult mixtures is caught in Syndy McMillen Conger's introduction to this collection of essays. As she says, academic readers of "the literature of sensibility " have tended to take it too seriously or not seriously enough. "If some students of the phenomenon have erred by claiming too much for the influence of sensibility on subsequent developments in art and life from the Romantic novel to the French Revolution, others have erred by viewing the phenomenon reductively and pejoratively" (p. 15). In other words, it is necessary to understand "sensibility" as afashion (and as odd and potentially banal as fashion must be), and then to treat the fashion as the articulation of important needs and hopes. The essay in the collection that best manages this is Stephen Cox's "Sensibility as Argument." The strength of this essay is that it sees that the claim to feeling which was called "sensibility" could have many uses, and be made by antagonistic parties. There were many wanting to demonstrate that they had best benefited from "the eighteenth century's extensive and varied program in the education of consciousness" (p. 68), and Cox neatly shows this in the argument between Paine and Burke. Paine admonishes Burke not for using sensibility as a test of political correctness, but for not having a sufficiently visceral sensibility. "Paine himself operates on the premise that feeling is good argument; the problem is that Burke's feelings are not spontaneous, and therefore not authentic" (p. 66). The most interesting "novels of sensibility," from Clarissa onward, are therefore those which demonstrate the different, conflicting uses to which sensibility might be put, and which show us contending claimants to the privilege of "feeling." As he rightly, if clumsily, says, the novels of Richardson, Goethe, and Laclos "are not just arguments about sensibility; they are arguments in which sensibility of one kind or another does plenty of arguing" (p. 72). In this version of things, Austen becomes an enemy not exactly REVIEWS 269 of sensibility per se, but rather of the opportunistic uses of "die argument of sensibility." It is all too available. None of the outer pieces so successfully fulfils the hopes of Conger's introduction. This explains that the book contains "reception stories": "each essay ... discovers tranformation in or by means of the concept of sensibility, transformations in artists, in their works of art, or in their—or others'—general attitudes" (p. 17). But stories of, as the book's title has it, "Creative Resistance to Sentiment" need to give some account of why resistance might have been necessary—of why sensibility so allured so many writers (including, as several contributors point out, some of its...

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