"This book offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of the history of the English novel. Ahern develops the provocative thesis that the amatory, sentimental, and Gothic fictional forms that dominate the marketplace in the early years of the novel are deeply connected by a concern with sensibility, a capacity for living intensely that is largely determined by class and gender. In all three of these fictional forms, a pervasive yet ambivalent unease over intense feeling testifies to the persistence of a conflicted romantic aesthetic well into the second century in the history of the novel"--BOOK JACKET.