Families of the Heart

In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary devicethe surrogate familyas a signal of cultural anxieties about young womens 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 Defoes and Richardsons 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 tropethe model of the hierarchal familyultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.