Early American Women, the Novel, and God

In this valuable study of nineteenth-century women's fiction, Ashley Reed argues against the critical tyranny of secularization. Indeed, the book's critical occasion lies in Reed's belief that secular and liberal modes of thought have shaped—and distorted—the study of American women's writing in general and the sentimental novel in particular. Focusing on the rubrics of subjectivity and agency, which have been central to the study of early American women's writing since its emergence in the 1970s and 1980s, Reed argues we need to revise our anachronistic understandings of the relation between secular and religious cultures. The study recalibrates that relation and recuperates women's writing's serious engagements with nineteenth-century theological and doctrinal controversies. This makes the sentimental novel, then, an “imaginative playground” (1) that mediates heaven and earth, theology and experience, and emotion and intellect. Women's fiction was “a space for religious reflection and for imagining alternative ways of being, believing, and...