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The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot Author(s) Rachel Ablow Publisher Stanford University Press Publication Year 2007 ISBN 0804754667 Link Amazon.com Abstract The Marriage of Minds examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life. Through close readings of canonical texts in relation to the histories of sympathy, marriage, and reading, The Marriage of Minds begins to fill a long-standing gap between eighteenth-century philosophical notions of sympathy and twentieth-century psychoanalytic concepts of identification. It examines the wide variety of ways in which novels were understood to educate or reform readers in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it demonstrates how both the form of the Victorian novel and the experience supposed to result from that form were implicated in ongoing debates about the nature, purpose, and law of marriage. Table of Contents Introduction: Reading Sympathy 1 1. Labors of Love: The Sympathetic Subjects of David Copperfield 17 2. The "Failure" of Wuthering Heights 45 3. George Eliot's Art of Pain 70 4. Good Vibrations: The Sensationalization of Masculinity in The Woman in White 95 5. Anthony Trollope and the Pleasures of Alienation 118 Afterword 145 Notes 151 Works Cited 201 Index 227

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