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

Can reading change the world? Late-nineteenth-century popular fiction thought the sympathetic reading experience could

• Reveals new local newspaper research which demonstrates how fin-de-siècle popular fiction impacted on readers and why they took it seriously
• Presents evidence that sympathy did not disappear as a motivator and concern of fiction after the mid nineteenth century as has commonly been supposed
• Explores sympathy inspiring late-nineteenth-century philanthropy such as the university settlement movement, influenced by contemporary fiction
• Summarises current scientific and philosophical thinking about empathy for fictional characters and reflection on what literary evidence can contribute to our understanding
• Re-evaluates Mary Ward’s reputation and revelation of the more progressive aspects of her work
• Provides insight into how readers interpreted and coped with the controversial aspects of Marie Corelli’s work, often in sophisticated ways – thereby confounding critics’ assumptions about the abilities of popular fiction readers

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 sensitivity to the battle of political ideas about inequality is here compared to Corelli’s bond of sympathy with common readers which sought to combat a corrupt society and the derision of critics. Science and philosophy’s arguments about what empathy stimulated by reading can achieve is contrasted with new empirical evidence of readers’ reactions, including from the pages of local newspapers. This shows what Ward’s and Corelli’s fiction of debate achieved in raising awareness and influencing thinking.