ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the representation of reading in the work of Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith, two leading exponents of the novel of sensibility. It argues that the development of this sub-genre was heavily informed by the key eighteenth-century concept of ‘sympathy’, which increasingly could be used to describe the relationship between writer and reader, and an especially active kind of reading. Sympathetic reading, in the sense of sympathy implied by David Hume and other moral philosophers of the early to mid-eighteenth century, is a welcome source of sustenance for the heroine in Smith’s fi rst two novels, Emmeline, or The Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (1789), and it is also an attractive, though not always achievable, ideal in the early novels of Burney. However, by the 1790s reading of this kind is frequently portrayed as complicated and fraught, and an alternative model of sympathy, derived from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) begins to inspire portrayals of the reading process. Focusing particularly on Burney’s last two novels, Camilla, or a Picture of Youth (1796) and The Wanderer, or Female Diffi culties (1814), this chapter demonstrates that this new theory of sympathetic reading, based on an ‘actor/spectator model’, while potentially benefi cial for the heroine if exploited skilfully, could also lead to a dangerous form of over-identifi cation and a lack of both critical and moral judgement.
