Taking up works by Samuel Richardson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, among others, Jennifer B. Camden examines the role of female characters who, while embodying the qualities associated with heroines, fail to achieve this status in the story. These "secondary heroines," often the friend or sister of the primary heroine, typically disappear from the action of the novel as the courtship plot progresses, only to return near the conclusion of the action with renewed demands on the reader's attention. Accounting for this persistent pattern, Camden suggests, reveals the cultural work performed by these unusual figures in the early history of the novel. Because she is often a far more vivid character than the heroine of the marriage plot, the secondary heroine inevitably engages the reader's interest in her plight. That the narrative apparently seeks to suppress her creates tension and points to the secondary heroine as a site of contested identity who represents an ideology of womanhood and nationhood at odds with the national ideals represented by the primary heroine, whom the reader is asked to embrace. In showing how the anxiety produced by these ideals is displaced onto the secondary heroine, Camden's study represents an important intervention into the ways in which early novels use character to further ideologies of race, class, sex, and gender.

Abstract: In a recurrent pattern in the nineteenth-century novel, authors introduce two female characters, only to focus on one and appear to forget the other. My dissertation examines this other woman: the "secondary heroine." The protagonists of Romantic novels are written to embody stable national identities, suggesting a transatlantic history of the Romantic novel in which both British and American authors equate the primary heroine with a cultural ideal of femininity. Yet both traditions challenge that cultural ideal through the figure of the secondary heroine. My dissertation demonstrates how authors initially deployed the "other woman" to suppress alternative images of womanhood and nationhood, but eventually embraced the secondary heroine as the centerpiece of the Realist novel. In the first three chapters, I pair British and American novels and examine the secondary heroine as a challenge to generic and nationalist constraints. I divide the Romantic novel into three separate subgenres: the epistolary novel, as exemplified by Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-8) and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797); the Gothic and its inheritors in the cult of sensibility, represented by Ann Radcliffe's A Sicilian Romance (1790), Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823); and the historical romance in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827). By pairing British and American texts of similar genres, I underscore the secondary heroine as a site of difference who reveals anxieties over unstable national identities. The Realist novel reversed the roles of "primary" and "secondary" heroines, preferring dangerous women to conventional heroines. My fourth chapter traces the role of the secondary heroine in theories of Realism. I argue that the Realist novel works to contain dangerous women through two narrative strategies: acculturation and resistance. My final chapter turns to the heroines of Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904). Situated at the cusp of Realism and Modernism, James's novel provides a fitting endpoint for my study: the construction of national identity via multiple marriage plots anticipates the fragmentation of identity and multiple narrators that characterize the modernist novel, erasing the distinction between primary and secondary heroines.

Women novelists of the Sri Lankan diaspora make a significant contribution to the field of South Asian postcolonial studies. Their writing is critical and subversive, particularly concerned as it is with the problematic of identity. This book engages in insightful readings of nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003); Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006); Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Turtle Nest (2003); Karen Roberts’s July (2001); Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007); and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008). These texts are set in Sri Lanka but also in contemporary Australia, England, Italy, Canada, and North America. They depict British colonialism, the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict, neocolonial touristic predation, and the double-consciousness of diaspora. Despite these different settings and preoccupations, however, this body of work reveals a consistent and vital concern with identity, as notably gendered and expressed through resonant images of mourning, melancholia, and other forms of psychic disturbance. This is a groundbreaking study of a neglected but powerful body of postcolonial fiction. “This is an excellent study that I believe makes a significant and timely contribution to the fields of postcolonial literature, Sri Lankan anglophone literature, diasporic literature, women’s studies, and world literature. It was a stimulating and thought-provoking read.” Dr Maryse Jayasuriya, The University of Texas at El Paso.