A careful and precise study of writers’ deployment and development of a discourse of sentiment and sympathy in the wake of the loss of political independence in Scotland, Juliet Shields’s Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 identifies the central shaping role of Scotland in the complex articulation of the “feeling” of national membership. Like Evan Gottlieb in his Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing (Lewisburg, PA, 2007), this study explores the social and political imaginings and uses of sentiment and sympathy in literature, yet it prioritizes the Scots theorizations of moral sentiments and collective identity both as Britons and as Scots. Shields argues that both a Jacobite tradition and the loss of political sovereignty positioned Scots in particular to define national community as based on feelings rather than on shared blood or economic interests.

In her contribution to the understanding of how the limits of a post-Union Scots political rubric informed those theories as well as their refraction in various literary forms Shields’s originality is in her attention to questions of gender and sexuality. In much of the scholarship to date, neither the role that women writers have played in shaping this discourse nor the complex gender dynamics involved in the social valuation of sensibility and sympathy have received much scrutiny. While Ina Ferris, in her The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge, 2002) has explored such issues in the Irish context, the current study distinguishes itself in its complex analysis of issues and motifs of gender and sexuality in relation to the discourse of sentiment in Scottish and English writings. Shields, for instance, foregrounds the ways in which writers grapple with what they believed to be the dangers of effeminacy and moral degeneracy posed by too much sensibility. The figure of the sodomite in Smollett’s fiction has received some attention, as has James Boswell’s troubled constructions of his own masculinity, but Shields’s analysis provides a more sustained discussion of the ways in which Scots theories of moral sentiments underpin a tentatively erected masculinity. Her work sees the vulnerability of sympathetic feeling awkwardly and is not always successfully balanced by the masculine self-control demanded by Adam Smith’s self-censoring subject. She suggestively locates this tension in the narrative structure of the picaresque, in the hero’s wanderings from and return to home, and order in an ongoing and sometimes treacherous writing of gendered national identities.

Like Maureen Martin’s The Mighty Scot: Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity (New York, 2009), Shields’s book moves the discussion of gender and sexuality in Anglo-Scots writing far beyond a simplistic allegory of marriage that once served as the basis for a very limited discussion of tropes of Anglo-Scot union. Marriage, as she points out, then and now is a motile figure depending on the kind of marriage one is talking about. As well, it is a Janus-faced figure, representing affiliation of different bloodlines, on the one side, and producing blood relations, on the other. Sentimental Literature tracks this complex ambivalence in literary representations of the domestic, examining sympathy, with its voluntary terms of social community, in relation to—and sometimes in contrast with—blood relations and the understanding of community as racially based. The brushing of these modes of affiliation and filiation have major implications for novelistic depictions of the family and the fluid dynamics by which one (affiliation) transforms into another (filiation) in eighteenth-century British writing. Matthew Bramble’s discovery of his blood relation to the indigent servant with whom he has forged sympathetic bonds (in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker) is just one of the better known instances of such transformations, which sometimes also shade into surprising motifs of incest.

In returning to questions of blood, then, Shields’s project rethinks the usually counterposed terms of race and social sympathy in the ideological formation of national bonds. The first chapter, for instance, provides a helpful disentanglement of the often tortuous racially based eighteenth-century historiography debating Celtic, Pictish, and Anglo-Saxon British origins that can leave the most careful reader bewildered. Shields uses these complex racial histories to trace in the Ossian poems the competing influences of that older blood-based racial historiography and that of the conjectural historiography superseding it, with its emphasis on, instead, evolving material and social relations and concomitant developments in voluntary sociability. In The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, NY, 1994), Adam Potkay gestured toward the references to conjectural history in the Ossian poems, remarking on the “feminine” qualities of Ossian’s sentimental warriors, but in adding a feminist take on conjectural historiography to her analysis—a historiography that, as Shields points out, judges each society’s stadial development in part by the status of women within it—and in applying a more vigorous analysis of Adam Smith’s model of sympathy’s working, Shields’s study provides a more thorough and satisfying account of the engendered terms of Anglo-Scots national discourse.

Especially provocative is the book’s claim not only that Scots writers played a more important role than English writers in promoting this dual basis of nation formation but also that an oscillation between race and sympathy can be traced to an earlier Jacobite rhetoric and poetics that most argue were entirely outmoded in the defeat of the Jacobite cause in 1746. While tantalizing, Shield’s discovery of the secret history of sentiment in Jacobitism, with such claims as “seventeenth-century Jacobite literature was already sentimental” (4) is in need of a more sustained demonstration than the book allows.

The book, nonetheless, is impressive in its breadth of analysis, moving from historiography to philosophical writings and through to a good number of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels. Shields explores the underexamined genre of specifically Scottish national tales, arguing that these women-authored fictions forwarded a domestically based sensibility powerful enough to supersede racial filiations in the construction of a heterogeneous Britain that could include “racially and culturally homogeneous and distinct Highland people” (112). In Christian Johnstone’s Clan-Albin and Susan Ferrier’s Marriage Highlanders themselves become a valuable living repository of the domestic sensibility modernization was veering dangerously close to driving out of Britain. Alternatively, in the writings of Walter Scott, James Hogg, and John Galt that drew from national tales but revised their terms in historical fictions, Shields argues, domestic sensibility, intrinsically linked to female sexuality, always threatens to descend into savage “ungovernable passions” (141), anachronistically challenging the new post-Union order.

In presenting such multilayered and often oppositional writings of Anglo-Scottish identities, Shields’s work helpfully insists on the extravagantly varying and provisional character of sentimentally based affiliation. Elaborated by Scots, who themselves occupied an “ambivalent position … at once strange and familiar” (86), the theories of moral sentiments that informed novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were, as Shields adeptly shows, unstable and adaptable. The literature that peoples those theories with human bodies—be it Lowland Scots, disenfranchised Highlanders, young English women, or even East Indians—illuminates, in Shields’s persuasive readings, the open-ended, ongoing, and occasionally failed terms of those adaptations.