Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818

Ruth Perry describes the transformation of the English family as a function of several major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century including the development of a market economy and waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the ‘rise’ of the middle class, and the development of print culture. In particular, Perry traces the shift from a kinship orientation based on blood relations to a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties as it is revealed in popular literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. Perry focuses particularly on the effect these changes had on women’s position in families. She uses social history, literary analysis and anthropological kinship theory to examine texts by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Henry MacKenzie, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and many others. This important study by a leading eighteenth-century scholar will be of interest to social and literary historians.

• This detailed study overturns and supplants existing theories of the English family • An important book by one of the world’s leading scholars of eighteenth-century literature • Sheds new light on the fictions of major writers between 1740 and 1818

Introduction; 1. The great disinheritance; 2. Fathers and daughters; 3. Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity; 4. Brotherly love in life literature; 5. Privatized marriage and property relations; 6. Sexualized marriage and property in the person; 7. Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation; 8. The importance of aunts; 9. Family feeling.

\'… engrossing book\'. Times Literary Supplement