“What did you mean?”: Marriage in E. D. E. N. Southworth's Novels

Abstract

Sentimental novels are filled with communication gone awry. This observation applies to the written word, as well as the spoken. For example, in The Wide, Wide World, Ellen Montgomery’s Aunt Fortune withholds a treasured letter written to Ellen by her mother and, in doing so, reveals Aunt Fortune’s arbitrary disciplinary regime (which is ultimately reversed by Alice Humphreys’s intercession). Likewise, much of the plot of Caroline Lee Hentz’s Ernest Linwood hinges on a misreading of a “marriage certificate” in which “the difference between the names of Henry Gabriel and Gabriel Henry St. James” goes unnoticed (440). E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Unloved Wolf depends upon Lilith Wyvil’s reading a “fatal letter” that first helps to destroy her marriage and then requires hundreds of pages to reconstitute it (91).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.