The Labours of History

Chapter Two examines how the evocation of sympathy in the historical novel generates both radical and reformist historical fictions. The interrogation of chivalric sentiment, which begins with Sophia Lee, accelerates after the French Revolution. Responding to Edmund Burke, radical writers like Charlotte Smith, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft argue for a redistribution of sympathy and for a new, more rational historiography. After the Terror, these notions of history for the ‘mass’ were themselves subject to reformulation, notably in the historical novel of the recent past. Historicising the French Revolution, Charles Dacres (1797), Lioncel; or Adventures of an Emigrant (1803), Edgeworth’s ‘Madame Fleury’ (1809) and Burney’s The Wanderer [1814] explore the possibility of an commercial exchange at once sympathetic and economic. Along with other historical novels including Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives [1795] and Montford Castle [1795]), such works implicitly suggest the need for workers to be safely politicised.

Female Gothic and the Law

The Gothic emerged in the eighteenth century as a potent literary critique of modern Western forms of law. At the same time as the law itself the Gothic began to take shape and rapidly diversify in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter suggests that Gothic writing by women in particular interrogates the ontological instability and physical vulnerability of the female subject before the law and that it does so through repeated evocations, in various historical and cultural contexts, of the relationship between law, sacrifice, trauma and shame. Points of continuity between older modes of Female Gothic and its more contemporary manifestations are identified through analyses of novels by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe and Eliza Parsons followed by an examination of female-authored vampire fictions by Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. Drawing on Juliet MacCannell’s work, the chapter argues that these diverse narratives articulate the trauma and shame of female subjects constructed in and through the law as sacrificial objects of exchange between ‘brothers’. Contemporary female Gothic fictions, it concludes, expose the trauma and shame of the law itself as its ontological coherence begins to disintegrate under the conditions of late-modernity.

Balancing Punishment and Treatment: Alternatives to Incarceration in New York City

This article is excerpted from Rachel Porter, Sophia Lee, and Mary Lutz's 100-page report of the same name originally published by the Vera Institute of Justice in 2002. The report assesses the operation of the alternatives to incarceration (ATI) program for dealing with defendants accused of felonies. This research has shown that the ATI system represents a valuable sentencing option in the city. The criminal justice system in New York City includes a unique network of alternatives to incarceration: a coordinated set of programs to which judges may send criminal offenders instead of sentencing them to jail. The programs balance punishment and treatment for felony offenders without compromising public safety, and they have the potential to reduce reoffending.