The cult of sensibility jangled the nerves of Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. It touched all literary genres and brought into prominence those qualities of tenderness, compassion, sympathy and irrational benevolence associated with women by the binary psychology of the time. It privileged spontaneous emotion and found this expressed in the bodily manifestations of tears, fainting fits, flushes and palpitations. Valuing the pure victim, it took as its archetypes the innocent dying Clarissa and the benevolent, suffering man of feeling.
In Sensibility, originally published in 1986, Janet Todd charts the growth and decline of sentimental writing as a privileged mode in the eighteenth century. She shows how sentimental writing is riven with contradictions: while it applauds fellowship, it also expresses a yearning for isolation, and while it stresses the ties of friendship and family, it does so at the expense of sexual feeling, which grows menacing and destructive.
By the 1770s, as the idea of sensibility was losing ground, ‘sentimentality’ came in as a pejorative term. Janet Todd ends her study of sensibility by detailing the various attacks on the cult, from radicals and conservatives, feminists and Christian moralists; from Coleridge who saw it as unmanning the nation to Jane Austen who considered it an elaborate sham
Biography
Janet Todd
Reviews for the original edition:
‘This book is a mine of information about the literature of Sensibility in the eighteenth century as well as a readable, witty and lucid discussion of its political, social and literary complexities. Janet Todd has written an excellent introduction to the subject for students, but she has also succeeded in making this introduction interesting in its own right…. I read it with unfailing interest and pleasure.’
Angela Leighton, Department of English, University of Hull
‘Concise, witty and consistently readable. There is no better brief account of Sensibility, an odd, amorphous but profoundly important movement of ideas. Janet Todd keeps both its intellectual implications and its artistic achievements intelligently in view.’
Marilyn Butler, St Hugh’s College, Oxford
