ABSTRACT
Richardson’s novels initiated and inspired a trend which dominated the novel in the second half of the eighteenth century and has been called the sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility. Both terms, ‘sentimental’ and ‘sensibility’, contain within them the signs of a new struggle within consciousness; between feeling on the one hand and reason on the other. This period is generally said to privilege the representation of feelings and emotions, witnessed in the physical responses of a passive, suffering heroine. This chapter demonstrates however that a nerve-based sensitivity and susceptibility is only one side of the story in epistolary novels of the late eighteenth century. It has less often been appreciated that the letter also offers the opportunity for reasoned, rational thought as characters order their experiences and present them to their correspondents. Often torn between the fevered passion of their experiencing self and the calm reason of their narrating self, fictional letter-writers of the period experience turbulent and sometimes unresolvable psychological crises.
