This rich and rewarding book should be required reading for any student developing a dissertation project on eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Ruth Perry has been a leader in the field for more than thirty years, and this book distills a lifetime of reading, thinking, and conversation: the footnotes tell a heartening story about scholarly community, highlighting an invaluable store of knowledge communicated in private conversation with researchers such as Susan Staves, Janice Thaddeus, Betty Rizzo, Jan Fergus, and many others. One of the book's greatest pleasures is the story it tells about feminist work in American universities. In an early footnote, Perry comments that her first book—completed in 1977—was “written in almost complete isolation”: “It is astonishing to remember what it was like to work without mentors or colleagues—ordinary conditions for a woman with a feminist project when I entered the academy” (7 n. 5). This is happily no longer the case, and Novel Relations lays out the guidelines for a massive and immensely valuable literary-historical project that is fundamentally feminist and collaborative in nature.

Perry's central argument concerns the movement in later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England “from an axis of kinship based on consanguineal ties or blood lineage to an axis based on conjugal and affinal ties of the married couple. That is, the biologically given family into which one was born was gradually becoming secondary to the chosen family constructed by marriage” (2). Novels reveal more than historical sources do about the psychological effects of this transformation, particularly when it comes to the tug-of-war between the obligations of the old system and the new one, for fiction “dramatized confusions about the reciprocal duties and responsibilities of individuals to their families, communities, and society” (2). Reading always for “the unconscious” of literary texts, “the anxieties that propel them,” Perry is particularly interested in fiction published from the 1750s to the 1770s, a body of novels in which “being cast out of a family or taken into a family is the adventure” (8). She treats these novels (a mix of canonical and noncanonical texts, chosen on the commonsensical if potentially controversial basis that “second-rate novels sometimes give one the terms, the critical vocabulary, and the insight with which to read the better literary works” [12]) “as a series of problem-solving scenarios and rhetorical responses to a disorienting change in the axis of kinship” (13).

This book goes against the grain of much conventional wisdom about the history of the family, but Perry's assertions are always backed up with carefully selected evidence, and the book as a whole is immensely persuasive. All the social and familial dislocations Perry explores fan out “from the redefinition of kin relations from a consanguineal to a conjugal basis in the second half of the eighteenth century” (although Perry makes excellent use of anthropological kinship theory, this is not the place to look for a critique of its vocabulary or assumptions), a redefinition that had a democratizing effect for men across most social classes but more restrictive consequences for women (33–34). Conceiving of families as constructed or earned rather than a matter of birth let enterprising men make their own way economically, while a combination of factors (the strengthening of marriage bonds, the weakening of ties of filiation, and a new emphasis on primogeniture) worked together to make parents less responsible for their daughters. Chapters on the disinheritance of women (including valuable readings of Richardson's Clarissa [1747–48] and Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron [1778]) and on eighteenth-century England's obsession with stories about fathers and daughters are especially strong. Perry has a gift for isolating the most puzzling tropes of eighteenth-century fiction—the cri du sang (voice of blood), the debate about the ethics of the “second attachment”—and marshaling an array of literary and historical evidence to make sense of them. She has mastered a huge body of disparate material, her commitment to presenting a balanced and responsible view of a complex topic enhanced by a sharp ear for the telling quotation (“I am got into the net of Matrimony,” writes one female diarist of the period, “and the more I flounce, the more bruises & Blows, shall I have” [139]). The best test of a work of literary criticism is how well it serves the major writers of the period, and the book triumphs in this regard: Perry's discussions of Richardson, Burney, and especially Austen (possibly the hardest of all the great English novelists to pin down in critical argument) are extraordinarily illuminating.

Inevitably, a book this ambitious has some shortcomings. The restriction to fiction is arbitrary, and the book's argument might be further strengthened by occasional attention to other genres, particularly the drama (though the reader's tendency to ask “I wonder how X would fit in here?” speaks mostly to its great strengths). More to the point, the book's length and copiousness make it unwieldy at times. The chapter on Arthur Young is interesting in itself but feels slightly out of place here: Perry describes it, fairly, as an attempt “to understand some of the reasons why this kin shift took place when it did, and what its economic and legal corollaries were” (408), but the book as a whole does not necessarily benefit from its inclusion. Yet even this chapter includes a characteristically thoughtful and clear acknowledgment of the problem with using literary examples “to identify and illustrate historical changes in kin relations—as if that evidence were not the slipperiest of all to interpret” (288). “Writers intensify and distort the details of their world according to their imaginative needs,” Perry observes, the novels they produce serving variously “as transparent examples of the historical phenomena [she has] been describing, as consolatory fantasies about insoluble problems, as nostalgic recreations of persistent myths” (289).

“One writes a book because one wants to read such a book and none exists,” writes Perry in a brief afterword (408). The magnitude of her self-appointed task—documenting all the kin relationships depicted in eighteenth-century English fiction and interpreting their significance—leaves “plenty of work to be done”: “It is my fondest hope that this effort will encourage other scholars to read for the kin relations in eighteenth-century fiction and that in time a sharper picture of the relationships among siblings, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, parents and children, maternal and paternal relatives, and unrelated friends of the family, made up by this collective vision, will emerge” (408). This is too modest. Perry's treatment of kin relations and the novel suggests avenues of inquiry that will clarify our understanding of many other kinds of eighteenth-century writing as well; similarly, students of the novel who wish to follow themes that have little to do with kinship have much to learn from Perry's learned and imaginative renderings of the desires and anxieties of writers responding to complex historical circumstances with strategies ranging from strategic misdirection to fantastic wish fulfillment.