Debutant novelist fully indulges her sentimental side
Your humble reviewer found Helen Cullen’s The Lost Letters of William Woolf a pretty sentimental sort of book, and it wasn’t entirely to his taste. Which isn’t to say that it’s a bad book
FICTION: The Lost Letters of William Woolf, By Helen Cullen, Michael Joseph, €14.95
It is, when you think about it, rather strange to accuse a novel of being “sentimental”. In its earliest usages, “sentimental” simply meant pertaining to physical and mental sensations – that is, to the stuff out of which all fiction is made. (In this sense, all novels are sentimental novels.) It was only in the late 18th century – when ...
