Sensibility in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde

This chapter discusses Romantic understandings of sensibility in Smith’s early novel, Ethelinde. Drawing on Arlie Hoschild’s twentieth-century analysis of the commodification of emotions, Morrissey breaks down the Romantic association of sincerity of feeling with virtue by illustrating how the text’s eponymous heroine uses authentic emotions for self-interested purposes. The chapter also unpacks Smith’s presentation of the female heiress, elucidating a double bind in which propertied women are not obligated to develop refined feelings to placate men, but become vulnerable to fortune-hunters because of the resulting lack of emotional intelligence. The chapter nuances the view that equates technical excellence in the long eighteenth-century novel with free indirect discourse, by arguing that the absence of free indirect discourse in Smith’s novel makes possible her social critique.