Realism, Evidence, and Truth

Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England - Beyond the Law. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 281. $42.50. Hal Gladfelder reconsiders the much-considered relation between early modern nonfictional representations of crime and the novel. His nonfictional accounts include newspaper reports, Old Bailey Sessions reports, dying speeches of malefactors about to be hanged, and popular criminal biographies. He focuses on two novelists, Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, both of whom also wrote nonfiction about crime. A third novelist, William Godwin, who addressed the problem of crime in his anarchist Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), comes in to frame the overall analysis. Some earlier writers have stressed the differences between, on the one hand, the nonfictional literature of crime, which they see as serving primarily to inculcate and reinforce ruling-class norms, and, on the other hand, fiction, which they see as critical of those norms. Others have found the novel itself an ally of the police. Gladfelder, however, argues that both the nonfiction and the fiction are oppositional. He contends that both forms of writing tend to legitimate, to project as desirable, the very disruptive potentialities they set out to contain

The Delicate Distress

Actress, playwright, and novelist, Elizabeth Griffith (1727-1793) won fame in England with the publication in 1757 of the first two volumes of Letters Between Henry and Frances, letters from her own courtship with Richard Griffith whom she secretly married in 1751. Her first novel, The Delicate Distress (1769), focuses on the problems women encounter after marriage—the issue of financial independence for wives, the consequences of interfaith relationships, and the promiscuity of their husbands. Against a backdrop of rural England and Paris of the ancien regime, Griffith reimagines the epistolary novel of sensibility in the tradition of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau from a feminist perspective that centers on strong, intelligent, and virtuous women. Two sisters exchange letters about urgent ethical questions concerning love, marriage, morality, art, the duties of wives and husbands, and passion versus reason, while two men correspond about the same subjects. At the story\u27s center is the deep distress of Emily Woodville, a virtuous young newlywed who suspects her husband of infidelity with a French marchioness from his past. The third volume in the series Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women, The Delicate Distress contributes to our understanding of the development of the novel. As Cynthia Ricciardi and Susan Staves show, Griffith\u27s exploration of the psychology of characters who observe and reflect but engage in no grand public actions anticipates Henry James. The editors\u27 introduction places The Delicate Distress firmly in the tradition of the English novel, provides the most complete biography available on Griffith\u27s life, and brings together the most important eighteenth- and twentieth-century criticism of the novelist\u27s work. Cynthia Ricciardi is a Ph.D. candidate at Brandeis University. Susan Staves is professor of English at Brandeis University. A valuable addition to the range of texts currently available. —British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies An excellent scholarly introduction providing information on the place of this novel in literary history and on Griffith\u27s background as a professional actress, translator of French novels, and playwright, as well as a novelist of sensibility. . . . Access to such 18th-century novels written by women is crucial to developing an understanding of literary history and of the novel as a genre. —Choice Fill(s) a genuine need among scholars and students interested in early British women novelists. —Kritikon Litterarum A novel about a utopian community founded and run by wealthy women who had previously been victimized in various ways. —Kritikon Litterarumhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1072/thumbnail.jp