SOURCE: "The Vogue of the Domestic Novel: 1850-1870," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. XLI, No. 4, October, 1942, pp. 416-24.

In the following essay, Cowie summarizes common plot elements of nineteenth-century sentimental novels, and argues that they prescribed conservative feminine values.

In 1842 William Gilmore Simms referred to Cooper's Precaution as "a very feeble work, . . . a second or third rate imitation of a very inferior school of writings, known as the social life novel." By the "social life novel," Simms meant a story in which the bulk of detail was made up of "the ordinary events of the household, or of the snug family circle." The action of such a story might reach its climax at a ball or a dinner party. To a man accustomed, as Simms was, to handling issues that determined the fate of states or nations, this sort of thing seemed paltry stuff, for it gave almost...