The author's concluding sentence suggests that
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. the novels can be read as containing a tension between romance and analysis
- Step 1: The conclusion offers a balanced view. Step 2. It finds interest in the tension. Answer: there is a tension between romance and analysis. Why not the others: these give one side only.
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