Sometimes a substitute is better than the original. Ann Campbell's Families of the Heart: Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel advances the scholarly conversation on fictional family structures by paying sustained attention to substitute family members—figures who stand in for more “natural” or supposedly genuine domestic roles or kinship ties. This lucid and reasonable book deepens our understanding of the pervasive yet understudied motif of surrogacy in the novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Burney. Women's choices in configuring surrogate relationships, Campbell observes, enable them to pursue marriage or other forms of personal fulfillment. In careful close readings of literary texts, Campbell reveals how creating surrogate families grants women opportunities for self-determination in lives circumscribed by patriarchal authority.
Campbell lays out the conceptual framework for her argument in her introduction, followed by five chapters that each examine two novels by one author. Such organization allows...
