Families of the Heart

Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Ann Campbell

2022
176 pages
$28.95
ISBN 9781684484232
Transits

In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device - the surrogate family - as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women's changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe's and Richardson's fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope - the model of the hierarchal family - ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.

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Reviews
"Families of the Heart offers a new view of sentimental fiction through the lens of familial relations. . . . I encourage scholars who are interested in feminist criticism and eighteenth-century sentimental fiction, society, and family to read this book: it is an innovative study of women's hearts, minds, and moralities via their choices of surrogate family members." - Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, March 2024

"Engagingly written and narratively taut, Families of the Heart is well worth reading for scholars of the novel, and is poised to launch any number of exciting further conversations." - Jane Austen Society of North America, Fall 2023 newsletter

"Campbell opens our eyes to a revolution of choice taking place during the eighteenth century. This groundbreaking study of surrogate families in the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Haywood, and Burney highlights the changing dynamics of family and marital politics, influenced not by blood but by bond." - Katherine Ellison, author of A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals

"Ann Campbell's Families of the Heart is a richly detailed study that provides a nuanced examination of surrogate families in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, and Burney. Campbell's insights about the roles of these families in the marriage plots of these novels are generative for scholars of the period." - Jennifer Golightly, author of The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s: Public Affection and Private Affliction (Bucknell University Press)

"This study skillfully synthesizes, builds on, and extends, through careful close reading, existing scholarship on surrogate families. Careful textual analysis is supplemented by an array of contextual work, from Defoe's didactic writing, to Richardson's own epistles to his female friends, and Haywood's periodicals. The novels under study, by Defoe, Richardson, Burney, and Haywood, are well selected and indicate not only broad changes over time but also, at times, the way authors experimented within their own corpus. . . . This close examination of ten novels provides a useful typology of surrogate families that is relevant both within and beyond the eighteenth century." - Sharon Alker, coauthor of Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature, 1642-1722

About the author:

Ann Campbell has published articles about family, courtship and marriage, and pedagogy in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Women, Aphra Behn Online, and Digital Defoe. She is a professor of English at Boise State University in Idaho.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $120.00, 9781684484249; EPUB: $28.95, 9781684484256