SOURCE: “Sentimentality: For and Against,” in Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century, Vanderbilt University Press, 1997, 174-212.

In the following excerpt, Lerner discusses the reception of the sentimental style used in describing children's deaths and asserts that it has received more favorable attention in recent times because it has been linked with feminism.

The whirligig of taste has performed many somersaults, but none more drastic than that concerning the sentimental child death. Sentimentality, which entered literature so self-consciously in the later eighteenth century, rode high in mid-Victorian times but by the twentieth century had disappeared from high culture, though it remained very much alive in popular culture—and the savagery with which [Aldous] Huxley and [F. R.] Leavis attack it may be partly directed at the “romantic” novels and tear-jerking films of their own day. Only in the last decade has there been a serious attempt...