Some applauded Sterne's work, others condemned it as immoral. She was supposedly driven mad with a desire to fill in Sterne's ambiguity with bawdry and sexual situations. Since these representations bear no resemblance to the responses of actual female readers, I propose they serve as a scapegoat through which are cast out anxieties about a reading practice Eric Rothstein calls imaginative expansion.
Imaginative expansion involves the addition of details to a text by a reader.
By employing the figure of the madding female reader as a scapegoat, cultural authorities tried to purge their anxieties about the implications of imaginative expansion, while still promoting it as a desirable way to read.