The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Albert J. Rivero (review)

As Albert J. Rivero writes in his introduction, the sentimental novel helped shape the conventions that characterize the English novel as we think of it today. This collection includes essays that make explicit the ways in which the sentimental novel informs or connects with other novelistic genres as well as with currents of thought in the eighteenth century, particularly scientific and empirical thought. The aim of this volume is thus to present “various aspects and contexts for thinking about the genre” while also pointing toward areas for further research (11). The flexibility of theme gives the authors freedom to imagine the ways in which eighteenth-century authors and texts worked with and against the conventions of the sentimental novel: for example, how authors such as Frances Burney and Sophia Lee found the genre effective as a way of exploring questions about women’s suffering after the apex of the form’s popularity in the early nineteenth century, as Melissa Sodeman argues, or how the gothic novel both used and repudiated the conventions of sentimental literature, as Hannah Doherty Hudson suggests. The uni fy ing point of the collection is that all the essays provide some new way of thinking about the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century. The volume offers updated approaches and, in many cases, revisions to existing scholarship on the topic. Particularly valuable is the move away from a single national literature as focus, evidenced by inclusions such as Gillian Dow’s essay on the French sentimental tradition, Maureen Harkin’s comparative analysis of The Man of Feeling and The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Joseph Bartolomeo’s essay on the sentimental novel in North America with a focus on novels by Hannah Webster Foster, Susanna Rowson, Frances Brooke, and William Hill Brown. Because of the breadth of the connections it makes, scholars working on a variety of topics in the long eighteenth century will find this volume useful, particularly those working on empiricism in the novel, scholars interested in sentimental modes of writing in Germany or France, those learning about the deployment of the sentimental novel for political purposes, scholars working on the depiction of slavery and the slave trade in the novel, or students interested in the legacy of the sentimental novel in the nineteenth century.

The volume includes twelve essays on a range of topics, beginning at the start of the long eighteenth century with early prose fictions by Eliza Haywood and Penelope Aubin and moving through the first quarter of the nineteenth century and the publication of Sophia Lee’s The Life of a Lover, Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), and Jane Austen’s Sanditon (1817) and Persuasion (1818). Many of the essays examine the sentimental novel’s connections to other forms of eighteenth-century fiction, such as the gothic novel, prose fiction, epistolary novels, or the transatlantic novel. Some of the essays I most enjoyed in the collection problematized the sentimental novel or the heroes of these novels, as the contributions by Sodeman, Barbara M. Benedict, Brycchan Carey, and Rivero all do. However, all of the essays changed or added to my understanding of the sentimental novel in the eighteenth century in some way. For example, Ros Ballaster’s essay situates prose fictions within the context of the epistemological and scientific thought of the time, showing how amatory feelings and experiences were subjected in these fictions to the type of empirical modes that were characteristic of debates in natural science; and Bonnie Latimer’s essay provides a thoughtful analysis of the differences between proverbs, maxims, and moral sentiments in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa that opened a new way of reading the novel for me. Similarly, Jonathan Lamb’s essay, “Sterne’s Sentimental Empiricism,” offers an insightful juxtaposition of Hobbesian and Lockean materialism and their connection to sensation as they are evinced through Yorick in A Sentimental Journey (1768) and Tristram in Tristram Shandy (1759) that was rich with insight.

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