Reading with Feeling in Camilla and Belinda

Current literary criticism claims that there was a shift at the beginning of the nineteenth century toward intellectual, rational reading and away from the emotional, affective reading encouraged by popular eighteenth-century genres such as gothic fiction and novels of sensibility. Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth are often identified as vanguards of this change, paving the way for nineteenth-century realism. By examining Camilla (1796) and Belinda (1801), I will challenge this genre-based chronology of the novel's development by arguing that Burney and Edgeworth valued reading with feeling and that their positive representations of affective reading have shaped the rise of the novel and the reader-text relationship.