ABOUT THIS BOOK

In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device—the surrogate family—as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope—the model of the hierarchal family—ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ann Campbell has published articles about family, courtship and marriage, and pedagogy in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Life, Eighteenth-Century Women, Aphra Behn Online, and Digital Defoe. She is a professor of English at Boise State University in Idaho.

REVIEWS

“Campbell opens our eyes to a revolution of choice taking place during the eighteenth century. This groundbreaking study of surrogate families in the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Haywood, and Burney highlights the changing dynamics of family and marital politics, influenced not by blood but by bond.”

— Katherine Ellison, author of A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals

“Ann Campbell’s Families of the Heart is a richly detailed study that provides a nuanced examination of surrogate families in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, and Burney. Campbell’s insights about the roles of these families in the marriage plots of these novels are generative for scholars of the period.”

— Jennifer Golightly, author of The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s: Public Affection and Private Affliction (Bucknell University Press)

“This study skillfully synthesizes, builds on, and extends, through careful close reading, existing scholarship on surrogate families. Careful textual analysis is supplemented by an array of contextual work, from Defoe’s didactic writing, to Richardson’s own epistles to his female friends, and Haywood’s periodicals. The novels under study, by Defoe, Richardson, Burney, and Haywood, are well selected and indicate not only broad changes over time but also, at times, the way authors experimented within their own corpus. Of particular note, is the perceptive reading of the way Richardson’s novels, in distinct and dynamic ways, experiment with familial configurations, moving towards a grand quasi-utopian vision of surrogate families in Sir Charles Grandison, one in which surrogate siblings become crucial to the intellectual and emotional development of main characters. Most valuable to this reader was the way in which this study reveals the way that women writers transformed inherited models of the surrogate family to create dynamic families who exist not merely to propel the female protagonist towards marriage but also to enhance the emotional and intellectual development of female characters, to encourage discernment in the selection of close advisers, and to demonstrate that women can live fulfilling lives regardless of circumstances. This close examination of ten novels provides a useful typology of surrogate families that is relevant both within and beyond the eighteenth century.”

— Sharon Alker, coauthor of Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature, 1642-1722

“Ann Campbell’s Families of the Heart is a richly detailed study that provides a nuanced examination of surrogate families in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, and Burney. Campbell’s insights about the roles of these families in the marriage plots of these novels are generative for scholars of the period.”

— Jennifer Golightly, author of The Family, Marriage, and Radicalism in British Women's Novels of the 1790s: Public Affect

“Engagingly written and narratively taut, Families of the Heart is well worth reading for scholars of the novel, and is poised to launch any number of exciting further conversations.”— Jane Austen Society of North America

“This study skillfully synthesizes, builds on, and extends, through careful close reading, existing scholarship on surrogate families. Careful textual analysis is supplemented by an array of contextual work, from Defoe’s didactic writing, to Richardson’s own epistles to his female friends, and Haywood’s periodicals. The novels under study, by Defoe, Richardson, Burney, and Haywood, are well selected and indicate not only broad changes over time but also, at times, the way authors experimented within their own corpus. Of particular note, is the perceptive reading of the way Richardson’s novels, in distinct and dynamic ways, experiment with familial configurations, moving towards a grand quasi-utopian vision of surrogate families in Sir Charles Grandison, one in which surrogate siblings become crucial to the intellectual and emotional development of main characters. Most valuable to this reader was the way in which this study reveals the way that women writers transformed inherited models of the surrogate family to create dynamic families who exist not merely to propel the female protagonist towards marriage but also to enhance the emotional and intellectual development of female characters, to encourage discernment in the selection of close advisers, and to demonstrate that women can live fulfilling lives regardless of circumstances. This close examination of ten novels provides a useful typology of surrogate families that is relevant both within and beyond the eighteenth century.”

— Sharon Alker, coauthor of Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature, 1642-1722

“Campbell opens our eyes to a revolution of choice taking place during the eighteenth century. This groundbreaking study of surrogate families in the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Haywood, and Burney highlights the changing dynamics of family and marital politics, influenced not by blood but by bond.”

— Katherine Ellison, author of A Cultural History of Early Modern English Cryptography Manuals

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
1          Just Business: Surrogate Families as Entrepreneurial Ventures in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana
2          Building a Foundation for the Family of the Heart: Prototypes of Surrogate Families in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Pamela in her Exalted Condition
3          Perfecting the Family of the Heart: Relationship Remembered in Richardson’s Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison
4          An Affinity for Learning: Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy
5          Adopting to Change: Choosing Family in Frances Burney’s Evelina and Cecilia
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index