Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History by Melissa Sodeman (review)

Melissa Sodeman’s Sentimental Memorials: Women and the Novel in Literary History is a metacritical work, which at once performs the dense and detailed work of women’s literary history and reflects critically on what literary history is and under what cultural and ideological pressures it is constructed. Sodeman’s focus is on four women writers from the late eighteenth century: Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson. In examining their sentimental fictions, Sodeman “argues that sentimental novels of the 1780s and 1790s reflect on and provide ways of thinking about the conditions of cultural and literary survival” (p. 3). These novelists, she claims, had a “literary-historical self-consciousness,” which made them “aware of the winnowing of literature to exclude sentimental fiction” and thus to write them out of a literary canon that, at this precise period, was being constructed around a handful of male poets (p. 13). Sodeman argues that sentimental fiction is a “self-historicizing genre” that “addresses—in self-consciously literary ways—questions posed by the restructuring of literature,” a claim that is bold, original, and thoroughly convincing (p. 13). In drawing attention to this aspect of their work, Sodeman also asks us, as critics, to read formally, for the literary qualities of texts, as well as to read historically. This combined approach results in densely contextualized readings of literature that are also remarkable for their closeness and care. Sodeman’s ability to bring formalist and historicist methodologies together is a significant and productive achievement, especially given the sometimes uneasy relationship between these methodologies.

The first two chapters of Sodeman’s book, on Lee’s The Recess (1783–1785) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), dovetail well. Sodeman demonstrates that there is not only a literary historical connection between these two authors, showing with what care Radcliffe must have read Lee, but also a virtual conversation between them about the way in which literary form memorializes women’s writing. Lee, argues Sodeman, forms a relation to the past that is not about recovery but that aims “to generate highly wrought images of its irrecoverableness” (p. 21). Lee “uses sentimental devices to invite readers to mourn the irretrievable past” and tells “a story about what cannot be known, a story that can only be accommodated by the novel’s open form and rich capacity for literary experimentation” (p. 23). Sodeman thus argues that Lee creates a specifically literary and novelistic relation to the past, a relation that differs from that proposed by sentimentalist historians such as David Hume and William Robertson, who use sentiment as “a tool that may revive the past” (p. 27). In turning to Radcliffe, Sodeman extends this analysis of the relation of women’s sentimental fiction to the remembering of the past and argues that, for Radcliffe, the past is not quite irrecoverable but accessible through the act of reading. This interpretation of Radcliffe upends traditional assumptions about romance reading in general. Far from being an immersive and unreflective experience, romance reading in Radcliffe is immersive precisely because we are aware of the illusion generated by literature and reflect on it. Furthermore, Sodeman argues that, for Radcliffe, literary forms, and thus the way we are affected by reading them, become obsolete. Radcliffe’s novels, then, are not just reflections on reading or on the irrecoverable past but meditations on how the past becomes irrecoverable because the way we read changes. Radcliffe formally anticipates the decline of sentimental fiction even as she composes its greatest works.

The final two chapters of Sentimental Memorials also deal with the longevity of sentimental fiction in discussing the ways in which Smith and Robinson thought about their own legacy as sentimental women writers at a time when they were being excluded from the canon. Sodeman creatively reads Smith’s habit of repeating herself and copying others as a self-conscious form of imitation. Sodeman argues that Smith’s “novels...