Producing Romantic Identities in the British Novel in Letters, 1740-1818

Examines how British epistolary novels from 1740–1818 use seemingly ‘flat’ characters to question what constitutes personal identity across race, class and gender.

Few literary genres have had such a long-standing impact over the development of the novel than the letter narrative. Providing a set of easily reproducible conceits, epistolary narratives formed a critical pillar of the early novel marketplace, leveraging the familiarity of letters in their plural forms as part of the everyday experience of readers. Yet, the anarchic, experimental and often uneven forms of letter-narrative of the early eighteenth century homogenised into a far more conservative novel of sentiment, the staples of circulating libraries and the target of satire, rather than nostalgia, in Romantic fiction. Nevertheless, Romantic novels in letters inherited many of the strategies of their predecessors: particularly, a reliance upon flat characters to shoulder much of the burden of plot.
Susannah Minifie’s Barford Abbey (1768), Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), Jane Austen’s juvenile burlesques, Maria Edgworth’s Leonora (1806), The Woman of Colour (1808) and finally Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) are read closely to explore the relationship between flat character and Romantic notions of personal identity. I argue over these readings that characters made ‘flat’ by plot – by formations of gender, race and foreignness – mark the limits of personal identity. I suggest that these flat characters do not invite dismissal by a reader but rather register their appropriate position within hierarchies of care. Flat characters presented readers with ethical challenges which ‘personate’ characters could not, simplifying the excessive sympathies demanded by sentimental novels, Gothic fiction and Romantic poetry.
Producing Romantic Identities in the British Novel in Letters, 1740-1818 offers a timely re-examination of the use of character in epistolary fiction. This book presents new readings of well-surveyed and minor novels informed by recent approaches to character in long eighteenth-century fiction, pornography and periodicals. It argues that novels-in-letters repeatedly turned to flat characters to ask, what makes a ‘self’? What markers of race, class or gender might prevent one from having a ‘self’?