The politics of the sentimental novel have been debated for decades, but on one issue all parties seem to agree. Influential critics like Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins, who otherwise differ radically in their analysis of women's fiction, concur that sentimental narratives are an integral part of the doctrine of separate spheres and that they consistently position their female readers and protagonists in the domestic realm. Douglas de-scribes the novels' relegation of women to the familial realm as regressive, while Tompkins argues that" for these women... it is the prerequisite of world conquest"(Douglas 297-300; Tompkins 143). But whether they view the development of domestic ideology as deepening women's oppression or as a more ambiguous epistemological shift in women's relations to the public and private spheres, both critics agree that the form and content of sentimental literature express the values of Vic-torian femininity.

The fit between genre and ideology may not be so tight, however. The narrative exigencies of sentimental fiction and the ideological imperatives of domesticity exist in tension with one another. For instance, the sentimental narrative has a surprising tendency to disarticulate domestic spaces. Rather than insistently fixing heroines in their families, many sentimental plots begin with young girls leaving their homes, either by being orphaned or by their own choice. And instead of concluding with happy marriages or by otherwise restoring their heroines to normatively defined families-in which case the initial departure from the family could be read as ultimately supportive of domestic values-the novels often place their heroines in