One of the holy grails in the history of historiography has been the boundary line between history and fiction. However, many scholars, influenced by Hayden White and, later, poststructuralist theory, have argued that this quest is fruitless: professional history and historical fiction form part of the same narrative enterprise. This has proven to be an especially popular approach among feminist critics seeking to reclaim female historians—frequently erased from the intellectual world announced in the title of J. P. Kenyon's The History Men—as major players in the shaping of the modern historical sensibility. Devoney Looser, Megan Matchinske, Bonnie Smith, and Mary Spongberg, among many others, have excavated women writers' roles in developing (and challenging) changing practices of historical scholarship. Lisa Kasmer's Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760–1830 continues this trend.

Kasmer turns to women's historical writing as a gendered political intervention. Here, historical writing encompasses genres ranging from Lucy Aikin's poetry and biographies to Catherine Macaulay's republican historical narratives to Helen Maria William's French Revolution journalism. What unifies these texts, though, is the role of “sentimental” and “sympathetic” discourses, which break down the pretense that public and private spheres can ever be fully separated. (Here, Kasmer builds on the work of Mark Salber Phillips, especially Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820.) Chapter 1 studies a historian whose work has always been considered problematic for feminists, Catherine Macaulay. Kasmer argues that Macaulay, who was in an awkward position as a woman writing history in the republican tradition, positioned herself against David Hume on the grounds of sympathy. Hume's seeming sympathy conceals “moral indifference” (29); Macaulay's language of feeling and “the heart,” by contrast, feminizes republicanism and “associates her history writing and herself with domestic, as well as rational and moral, virtue” (33). In chapter 2, Kasmer turns to historical fictions that initially seem to have radically different priorities: Sophia Lee's influential Gothic historical novel The Recess and Ann Yearsley's play Earl Goodwin. In both cases, Kasmer again finds sentiment turned to political use. She argues that The Recess's terrors register late eighteenth-century anxieties about uncontrollable crowds and turn its monarchs into allegorical condemnations of George III's court. Earl Goodwin, by contrast, does not share The Recess's skepticism about “the people,” although Yearsley also condemns George III. Instead, the gradualist Yearsley uses Earl Goodwin to imagine a politician who urges his king to have “a sense of compassion toward his subjects” (65).

By the end of the first two chapters, then, Kasmer has established that sympathy and sentimentalism served many political masters. Turning to Helen Maria Williams in her third chapter, Kasmer finds “[e]motional outpourings that promote progressive politics” (75), thereby differentiating her from Enlightenment forebears such as Smith. Indeed, Kasmer identifies an antihistory impulse in Williams's historiography, which turns to “romance” in order to “reimagine history writing altogether” (77). In practice, this means that Williams uses intense affect in order to dispose her readers toward the French Revolution—regicides included. Williams's interest in the romance's historical potential reappears in the fourth chapter, on the early historical novelist Jane Porter. Again, Kasmer emphasizes how such genre strategies were not tied to any political position, since Porter was Williams's diametrical opposite. In Porter's case, “romance” takes on a more historically specific valence: she draws on practitioners of early modern romance, such as Sir Philip Sidney (97), to develop a “conservative” mode of sentiment and sensibility that stands against the more spontaneous mode associated with writers like Williams. In novels such as The Scottish Chiefs, Porter combines chivalric romance, sentiment, and Burkean conservatism to laud political systems “based in the earlier values of aristocratic honor and absolute monarchy” (106).

Chapter 5 turns to Mary Shelley's Valperga, an Italian historical novel about Castruccio Castracani, to show a novelist representing sympathy gone haywire. Playing Castracani against a fictional female ruler, Euthanasia, Shelley celebrates the role of sympathy for the common man in constructing republican governments (rather like Macaulay) while also suggesting that politics ultimately subvert such sympathetic impulses (119). However, Shelley also subscribes to a belief in human (and Italian) “degeneration” (122) that renders republicanism a pipe dream at best. Kasmer's final chapter uses the poet and biographer Lucy Aikin as a culmination of all that has gone before, finding in Aikin her one unequivocally feminist historian. Thus, Aikin's Epistles on Woman deploys Enlightenment stadial history, only to argue that its version of “progress” fails to take into account how men use force to “subordinate the weaker sex” (139). And in her Memoirs of Elizabeth I, Aikin anticipates how modern feminists have understood the sociocultural construction of gender. Moreover, Aikin's work, Kasmer claims, self-reflexively demonstrates “gender and genre's impact on the production and reception of women's history writing” (151). Jarringly, although Kasmer's narrative climaxes with this chapter, the unifying thread of sentiment and sensibility drops out entirely, and the chapter's claims about the self-reflexivity of Aikin's work are never fully fleshed out.

This final chapter exemplifies a problem with this relatively short monograph: with apologies to Samuel Johnson, one does wish it longer than it is. Kasmer's restricted list of authors and works leaves the reader wishing for more context, if only to establish that her subjects demonstrate a larger trend. It also would have helped if Kasmer had engaged with more of the leading stadial historians (e.g., John Millar), since their understanding of gender and genre sometimes anticipates what Kasmer finds here (especially in the Aikin chapter). That being said, Kasmer's refusal to reduce her analysis of women's writing to the dull questions of “feminist or not?” and “radical or not?” is welcome. So too is her attention to Jane Porter and Sophia Lee, two authors all too often downgraded to “precursor of Walter Scott.” Scholars specializing in post-Romantic historiography will be interested in thinking about the fate of “sensibility” or “sentiment,” especially in relationship to later nineteenth-century developments in historical professionalization. Overall, both literary critics and historians of historiography should find this a suggestive study.