'Feeling Others' Feelings' Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. ISBN: 0-8047-2548-9. Price: £30

In Strange Fits of Passion, Pinch argues that feelings travel: that is, they are contagious, communicable, and that their most hospitable environment is literature and its uses. Quotation, in other words, facilitates the contagion. This book ingeniously, and sometimes unconvincingly, maintains that the eighteenth century saw a new approach to emotions, one that justified and necessitated an increasingly liberal use of other peoples' formulations of feeling in order to communicate one's own. Its strength is its intelligent and provocative thesis; its weakness lies in a tendency towards assertion and a puzzling failure to sustain the argumentative links each succeeding chapter illuminates. When I reached the end, I felt both pleasure in the new insights generated, and surprise at what were at times glaring omissions of association. Pinch's aim in moving from Hume to Austen (and beyond) is to demonstrate that 'it is possible to talk about a long "era of sensibility" stretching from the end of the seventeenth century into the beginning of the nineteenth' (11); accordingly, she discerns a thread of emotional attachment between these periods that 'confirms' (Pinch's word, a trifle overused in the text) the paradoxically marginal centrality feelings occupied during the long eighteenth century. As she reaffirms in the book's 'Coda', 'stories of feelings' histories and origins. . .have often opened up gaps between feelings and their causes, tensions between ways of explaining them, and impasses over their etiologies' (164). People both accord an increasing amount of importance and relevance to 'their' feelings, and express them in such a way as to detach their feelings from their bodies; the private knowability of emotion is transformed into a public, agreed-upon mode of expression that simultaneously authorises and deauthenticates the feelings it describes. Freud plays a part in this study, and Pinch's methodology reflects a reliance on psychoanalytical excavation—the idea that words and expressions mask often conflicted psyches (public and private) and require revelation—but her technique is, thankfully, tempered and strengthened by an impressive historical grasp. Thus she can draw her reader from Hume to the 1820s and maintain, for the most part, a sense of historicity and perspective. Pinch's stated aim is to explore the contagious nature of emotions and their ability to 'live as autonomous forms, stalking about as personifications, often in vexed and detached relations to the persons presumed to be feeling them' (1). She discusses David Hume, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and the death of Princess Charlotte, and often takes an 'exemplar' approach: Hume represents 'the eighteenth century', Smith is 'women's sentimental poetry', Radcliffe signifies 'the Gothic'. This presents some problems, as we move from Hume straight into Smith (a journey of some 45 years), with very little sense of the progress of time (she is much better in subsequent chapters, all focused on the Romantic period). In addition, treating these figures as exemplars does result in the loss of their individuality, and stands in sharp contrast to the chapters on Wordsworth and Austen, where these authors stand only for themselves. This becomes a real problem in the chapters on Smith and Radcliffe. Pinch uses her Introduction to set up key themes and introduce her key terms: quotation, feeling, emotion, contagion, and passion. She is perceptive in her delineation of these terms, and her understanding of their changing significance for eighteenth-century 'feelers'. As she says, 'one of this book's central claims. . .is that the eighteenth century's revolution in epistemology, which both gave feelings empirical origins and declared their social benefits, had strange effects on how writers represented people's relations to their feelings' (7). The first chapter's emphasis on …