The Politics of Sympathy and the Reading Experience: The Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction of Mary Ward and Marie Corelli

This book argues that the sympathy underpinning mid-nineteenth-century fiction’s ethics and author/reader relationships had a significant afterlife. It was crucial to Walter Besant’s fiction theory and politics as well as to other fin-de-siècle writers’ exploration of women’s philanthropy and the problems of poverty. What we now term 'empathy' was crucial to the very different fiction of Mary Ward and Marie Corelli and the social influence they wished to exert. Ward’s desire to stimulate se...