Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791

Kathleen James-Cavan is an assistant professor and Graduate Chair of the
English Department at the University of Saskatchewan. She is the editor
of Sense and Sensibility.

In examining the enduring relationship between the portrait and the
novel throughout the 18th century, Alison Conway offers a new way of
viewing the history of the novel. Literary historians have long held
that the middle of the 18th century witnessed a paradigm shift from the
amatory fiction of the early century to the post-Clarissa, middle-class
novels of morality in the later part of the period. Conway’s study
shows that such disparate texts as Delarivier Manley’s The New
Atlantis and Richardson’s Clarissa are connected through their
representations of women’s relation to the act of viewing as well as
their place in visual culture. She finds similar links through the use
of the portrait in works by Haywood, Fielding, Sterne, Wollstonecraft,
and Inchbald. She includes, as well, a discussion of the work of the
female painter Angelica Kauffman.

In possibly the strongest chapter of the book, Conway begins with a
study of the reception of the novel and the portrait. She points out
that portraiture ranked very low in the minds of contemporary critics in
contrast with the perceived civic virtues of history painting.
Similarly, the novel was accused of contributing to loss of time and the
encouragement of immorality by turning readers inward, toward private
rather than public interests. Conway situates her discussion at the
intersection of the novel and the portrait with the private space, a
site of cultural anxiety in its association with women.

In the chapters treating the novels and their relation to the visual,
one might wish to hear more of Conway’s voice and less of previous
critics. Nevertheless, Private Interests is an important and persuasive
contribution to the history of the novel; the book should also interest
art historians.