Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels advanced several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the self-possession open to those denied a full civic identity. Two contemporary models for the defining of selfhood through reference to property structure the book, one historical (classical republicanism and bourgeois individualism), and the other literary (pastoral and georgic). These paradigms offer a cultural context for the analysis of both canonical and less well-known writers, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Mackenzie to Clara Reeve and Jane West. While this study focuses on fiction from 1740–1800, it also draws on the historiography, literary criticism and philosophy of the period, and on recent feminist and cultural studies.

• Wide-ranging interdisciplinary study placing eighteenth-century novels in the context of early modern explorations of identity • Explores the work of canonical and non-canonical writers • Provides insights into gender issues in eighteenth-century fiction and culture

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Samuel Richardson and Georgic: Introduction; 1. Clarissa and the georgic mode; 2. Making meaning as constructive labor; 3. Wicked confederacies; 4. ‘The work of bodies’: reading, writing and documents; Part II. Pastoral: Introduction; 5. The Man of Feeling; 6. Colonial narratives: Charles Wentworth and The Female American; Part III. Community and Confederacy: Introduction; 7. Versions of community: William Dodd, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve; 8. Confederacies of women: Phebe Gibbes and John Trusler; Part IV. The Politics of Reading: Introduction; 9. The discourse of manliness: Samuel Jackson Pratt and Robert Bage; 10. The gendering of radical representation; 11. History, romance, and the anti-Jacobins’ ‘common sense’; 12. Jane West and the politics of reading; Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

‘April London’s fascinating study of the eighteenth-century novel offers a sustained investigation of the ‘ways in which the signal importance of property to the eighteenth century is both affirmed and complicated when women are included in the account.’ Review of English Studies