Political Affairs of the Heart

Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to womens engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britains national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sternes A Sentimental Journey (1768)which first introduced sentimental discourse to the traveloguefacilitated womens gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the countrys sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nations perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.