The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot

Ablow (English, State U. of New York at Buffalo) examines the relationship between sympathy and subjectivity in mid-19th century novels about marriage by Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope. Particularly concerned with the Victorian claim that novel reading could influence readers in the same manner as sympathy in married life, she discusses connections between 18th philosophical notions of sympathy as a means by which one defines oneself against others and 20th century psychoanalytic concepts of identification and the other, the variety of ways in which novels were understood to be experienced by readers in the mid-19th century, and the relationship between mid-19th century understandings of the Victorian novel and ongoing debates about the nature and purpose of marriage. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)