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  • Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History by Melissa Sodeman
  • Kristen Lacefield
Sodeman, Melissa. Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. 186pp. $45.00 hardcover; $42.75 ebook.

This gendered study of sentimental literature focuses on four writers: Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson. Melissa Sodeman expands the critical conversation on sentimental fiction to argue for an analysis with a greater emphasis on book history, particularly changes that occurred in the literary industry in the late eighteenth century. In addition, Sodeman examines the ways in which cultural and critical attitudinal shifts concerning sentimental literature, especially regarding women’s writing, influenced female novelists of the period. In exploring these relationships between book history and authorship, Sodeman offers new explanations for what are often viewed as the deficiencies of sentimental novels, thus providing a kind of critical apologia for the subjects of her study.

Sodeman begins her analysis by discussing the problematic context for authorship and publication in late eighteenth-century England. It is certainly nothing new to assert that women writers experienced difficulties in publishing at this time, but Sodeman contributes valuable, original insights into the period’s “conditions of cultural and literary survival” and “notions of authorship, established criteria for evaluating literary works, and legal protections for authors” (2). Such conditions, in Sodeman’s view, provide a rationale for the commonly derided shortcomings of sentimental fiction: “Read this way, the excesses of late-century sentimental novels—long decried for their riotously improbable plots and over-the-top feeling—register the strain produced by the disciplinary reorganization of literature at the end of the eighteenth century” (3).

Following her examination of the historical context for authorship and publication, Sodeman takes up the primary subject of her book—the novels of Lee, Radcliffe, Smith, and Robinson and the ways in which they respond to the pressures on late-century female writers. Chapter one focuses primarily on Sophia Lee’s novel The Recess and its depiction of history. Sodeman asserts that contrary to critical readings of [End Page 280] The Recess that view it as placing history and fiction in opposition to each other, Lee’s novel in fact “urges us to see fiction and history as cut from the same cloth” (20) and also “indicate[s] how aspects of lived experience are unavailable to history painting and history writing—or, rather, available to them only by recourse to novelistic modes of representation” (21). In Sodeman’s view, Lee’s attempt to challenge notions of historical accuracy accounts for her novel’s literary excesses. Taking traditional skepticism of historiography and lending to it a “distinctly affective turn” (27), The Recess challenges the belief in historical recovery “through highly wrought images that are at once excessive to history writing and that stand as elaborate innovations of novel form” (46).

In chapter two, Sodeman analyzes Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho and asserts that prominent scenes in these gothic novels of characters reading discovered manuscripts suggest that Radcliffe views the experiencing of the past via reading as illusory. For Sodeman, Radcliffe’s novels imply that “if readers believe the past can be made present through reading, if the page can transport them, it is only by their recognizing the illusory nature of the formal devices that produce what she terms ‘the illusions of the page’” (48). Radcliffe’s attempts to link historical reading with themes of illusion and the supernatural are significant, according to Sodeman, because they lend a greater philosophical and literary weight to her writing. Instead of constituting vacuous entertainment, Radcliffe’s novels indicate greater self-awareness and self-reflection than is generally acknowledged. Moreover, “by recalling a past that could not be recovered…Radcliffe anticipates how her own works were, despite their printed form, massive popularity, and widespread availability from booksellers and circulating libraries, strangely ephemeral” (56). In essence, Sodeman views Radcliffe’s acknowledgement of her novels’ ephemerality as a kind of protest against her exclusion (and the exclusion of female novelists) from the literary canon.

The final chapters of Sodeman’s book continue this attention to self-referentiality by...

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