In a review of Janet Todd's book on Sensibility, Claudia Johnson refers to the 'question of whether the ostensibly moralistic and feminine cult of sensibility serves or resists the social conditions that cause the suffering it veritably fetishizes' and calls for 'more sustained attention to the status of sensibility as a political practice' (ECS 22 (1988), p. 112-13).

The political allegiances of sensibility in Millenium Hall are at first analysis confusing. On the one hand, Scott constructs an all-female community comprised of intelligent, practical, active women who purposely refuse to marry or re-marry, but on the other hand characters suffer all for the sake of virginity and count filial obedience as the highest of virtues. This complex of female sentimental values embodied in [Samuel Richardson's] Clarissa remains for me a touchstone of patriarchal conservatism. In fact the ideologies of Millenium Hall are polyvalent and can be decoded only by analysis of the novel's heterogeneous narrative structure. What appears, from the teleological perspective of Leavis's Great Tradition, to be a defect in the narrative structure, its mixture of utopian description and multiple individual histories, turns out to be an oblique yet sophisticated commentary in which the oppression of women in society becomes a metonymy for all forms of tyranny, over both humans and animals.

Joseph Allen Boone's Tradition counter tradition emphasises the use of narrative structural difference as a mode of resistance to hegemonic sexual and literary ideology. Boone starts from Tony Tanner's observation that 'For bourgeois society marriage is the all-subsuming, all-organising, all-containing contract […] It is the Structure that maintains the Structure' (p.5). Millenium Hall, however, is a novel that de-centres marriage, that builds its narrative around the freeing of heretofore sentimental heroines from the marriage plot into a different kind of story. Its six leading members have refused marriage or re-marriage for various reasons. Boone identifies one facet of the novel's structural doubling: 'its series of inset tales about the women's pasts combines what seems to be every possible variation on the traditional love-plot with an essentially nonlinear organization that mirrors the harmonious stasis that has been created within this all-female world' (p.288).

Scott encoded two entirely different political agendas, in the histories and in the descriptive parts of the book. Even though the heroines of the histories become the founding members of the utopian society, while enmeshed in the discursive practices of novelistic, sentimental history, they are not able to oppose its rules of chastity and obedience; they follow the rules with the most scrupulous attention to feminine virtue. Only in the endings of their individual histories do they achieve the status of liberated heroines who self-consciously resist the trap of marriage. And once in the position to construct their own new world they become free agents, presumably still chaste, but subject only to their own collectively created laws.

However, Millenium Hall, especially when read in conjunction with its sequel, Sir George Ellison, seems to have an agenda beyond separatism and the liberation of women, in its utopian vision of a social welfare state that provides jobs, education, health care, and medical disability pay, as well as basic food, shelter, and clothing for its citizens. Here again there is a tension between a seemingly radical political vision on the one hand and a conservative respect for hereditary rank, sometimes offset by individual merit, and enforced piety on the other. This larger utopian project is indicated by another doubling in the novel's structure, through its implied readers, one of whom is also the narrator.

In many ways the mode of Millenium Hall is rhetorical. It is clearly meant to effect a change in the reader. There are two doublings of the implied reader, one represented by the types of Ellison and Lamont and one unspoken in the text, the male versus the female reader, who would receive extremely different messages from both the histories and the utopian description. For the female reader, the novel would provide consciouness-raising and empowerment.

The two male visitors to Millenium Hall represent two different themes, two different classes, and two ideologies. Ellison, the narrator, while labelled a 'gentleman', is more properly a successful member of the wealthy middle class. Ellison's moral and spiritual character has been tainted by his pursuit of wealth through imperialism. His encounter with the socialist community of Millenium Hall re-awakens his active pursuit of virtue and he concludes his narrative with a commitment 'to imitate them on a smaller scale'. There is no hint in this book of sentiment for its own sake. Every part of the narrative is oriented towards showing both the implied readers and the actual readers, male and female, that the utopian practices represented in the text are realistic and susceptible of immediate implementation, though perhaps on a smaller scale.

The two male travellers require different types of social reform corresponding to the two discourses in the text. Ellison, predisposed to virtue but caught up in trade, a believer in middle-class respectability and achievement based on merit, is the reader who will respond to the utopian principles practised at Millenium Hall. Lamont, on the other hand, represents the more typical character of the aristocratic rake found in sentimental novels, and therefore calls for the kind of reform more commonly associated with the ideological contest between the Restoration aristocracy amd the emergent middle class in the early eighteenth century. Ellison characterises Lamont as a twenty-five-year-old coxcomb 'of an agreeable person, and lively understanding', who has 'a high opinion of himself (Scott, p.3). He is an infidel, idle and dissipated, guided by fashion rather than reason. Thus while Ellison is prepared to benefit from the actual design of the utopian community, as a model for his own moral practices, Lamont is the implied reader for the individual histories of the women who run the community, the histories which argue implicitly against marriage as a tyrannical and suffocating institution for capable women. More particularly he is meant to see, from the female point of view, the evils of seduction, or 'gallantry'. He also in general fulfils the function of the naïve interlocutor to whom the discourse of rational benevolence is entirely strange. Lamont is threatened by the attack on dissipation, and the more important notion that we share reciprocal responsibility for one another.

Known primarily for its vision of female separatism and solidarity, Millenium Hall is also a proposal for changing society at large. The formal complexity of the book is demonstrable. Even sympathetic critics, however, have dismissed Scott's political vision as pious, charitable, and sentimental, that is, not relevant to the real world of government, social theory, and economics. Her political vision has not been taken seriously for two reasons: firstly, it is based on an all-female community and relegated to the genre of the sentimental. Secondly, it criticises capitalist self-interest at a time when English society was not prepared for such criticism, when the liabilities of capitalist industrialism and imperial-ism had not become readily apparent, as they would do in the nineteenth century.

While espousing the cultural ideology associated with the middle class, valuing virtue, respectability, work, and usefulness, Millenium Hall also undermines the possessive individualism of laissez-faire capitalism. The utopian society does not abolish the hierarchical distinctions of social class, but it does repudiate the exploitation that accompanies superior rank in real life. It seeks to provide everyone with the basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, some useful work, the ability to give charity to others, and the equivalent of health and unemployment insurance. In its fusion of an idealised ethic of care modelled on feudalism with an ethic of work (p.67) and virtue derived from capitalism, the vision of Millenium Hall anticipates the conservative socialist formulations of many Victorian writers, such as Gaskell, Dickens, Carlyle, and Ruskin. The connection between the all-female nature of the community and the larger social vision is both implicit and complex. First, women can achieve autonomy only when freed from the male domination enshrined in English marriage and property laws. Unfortunately those laws are often enforced through the ideology of virtuous obedience, a fact not dealt with effectively by the sentimental tradition. The same qualities which privileged feminine sensibility also kept women submissive to the men who owned them. The value attributed to suffering in the sentimental novel also militated against direct rebellion. Millenium Hall, however, suggests that patriarchal tyranny also operates socially and economically, exploiting the weak and the poor.