The Domestic Novel Sadlier articulates explicit didactic goals
in her prefaces to both The Blakes and Flanagans and >Bessy
Conway. The plot of the former is closer than the latter to that
of the typical domestic novel or romance described by Nina Baym,
with a young and vulnerable heroine out alone in the wide world,
for all intents and purposes orphaned, if not actually
parentless, striving to make a way for herself while protecting
her virtue (Baym, 22-50). None of Sadlier's novels conform
completely to Baym's model, as Sadlier was not concerned with
individual heroines such as Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie or
Susan Warner's Ellen Montgomery. Sadlier is concerned with
classes of people -- Irish immigrants, and in particular Irish
women in traditional Catholic homes. Even in a novel ostensibly
about a single heroine, Sadlier does not limit herself to merely
telling Bessy Conway's story; she peoples her novel with an
entire village of Irish folk who immigrate together on the same
boat. In Blakes and the Fla