Rediscovering Elizabeth Blower

Compared in her own life to Frances Burney, the novelist Elizabeth Blower has virtually disappeared from literary history. Despite this neglect, Blower’s four novels reflect this writer’s experiments with new literary forms during a flourishing and transformative period in the novel’s evolution. Changes in this decade include the shift from epistolary to free indirect narration, the rising popularity of the gothic, and attacks on excessive sentimentality. All these developments can be traced through Blower’s eight-year career as a novelist. Dissatisfied with fashionable sentimentality, Blower searched for a new kind of tragic novel, finally achieving this goal in Features from Life (1788), a detailed psychological portrait of a crumbling marriage told in a style that foreshadows Austen’s. Worthy of rediscovery, Blower exemplifies the phenomenon of a fine and original writer obscured by the shadows of more canonical figures.