The Victim of Fancy:

by Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins

Editor: Daniel Cook

Chawton House Library
Chawton House Library: Women's Novels

Hb: 160pp: 2009
978 1 85196 259 4: 234x156mm: £45.00/$75.00

978 1 84893 253 1

The Victim of Fancy was first published in December 1786 and, despite favourable reviews, has not been published since. A work in the sentimental tradition, it is nonetheless at odds with many from that genre. The bibliophilic heroine of the novel is caught up in, and questions, various fashionable hero-worships of other authors, including Goethe, Sophia Lee, Frances Burney, Ossian, Milton and William Hayley. This is a novel that examines the perils as well as the pleasures of modern reading and, indeed, polite society more broadly.

Like many Romantic-period books, the issue of female education is directly addressed, often in conventional, but also in counter-intuitive ways that depart markedly from contemporary pedagogical theories. Unlike many sentimental works, daughters are largely marginalized and mothers essentially absent. Indeed, the common relationship explored here is that between siblings. Cook’s new scholarly edition of this forgotten novel will therefore be of paramount importance in allowing new insights into the form of the sentimental novel as it actually existed in the 1780s, and not as it is often perceived.

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Sample Pages: Letters I-IX + notes

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The Victim of Fancy:

by Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins

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