ABSTRACT
Johnson's warning is a testament to the eighteenth-century notion of the influence of fiction: the power of fiction to influence the minds of its readers, its power to be a force for the improvement of their morality or a force for their corruption. In Maria Edgeworth's estimation, fiction had become, as Catherine Gallagher has recently suggested, 'antiproductive' literature in the sense that the story exceeded the moral exemplar. Good fiction should guide the reader towards sympathy and benevolence rather than sentimentality; it should refine those qualities so that readers would not 'revolt' from the hardships found in 'poverty, disease and misery'. For the Edgeworths, sensibility without the mediating exercise of reason leads to an 'excess' of imagination. The element of didacticism in Edgeworth's novel, by closing off certain kinds of interpretation, creates a heuristic reading strategy. The heuristic aspect of novel writing defines 'the sort of reading' that produces 'reliable domestic women who would in turn raise useful productive children'.
