According to the passage, the older critics regarded Lowell's novels primarily as
For many years critics treated the novels of Harriet Lowell, written in the 1850s, as sentimental entertainments, valuable chiefly as records of the domestic life of her time. Recent scholars have argued that this view misses her real achievement. Lowell's plots do concern marriage and family, but her narrators regularly step back to comment on the economic pressures that shape her characters' choices, pressures that most of her contemporaries ignored. A heroine who accepts a loveless engagement is shown to do so because her widowed mother cannot support her. Such passages, the new critics claim, make the novels works of social analysis rather than romance. Skeptics reply that the passages are brief and that Lowell's endings, in which virtue is rewarded, undercut her own analysis. A fair judgment may be that the novels contain both elements, and that their interest lies in the tension between them.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. sentimental entertainments that recorded domestic life
- Step 1: The first sentence states the older view. Step 2. It was entertainment and a record of domestic life. Answer: sentimental entertainments. Why not the others: these are the recent view or not stated.
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