Women's Lives and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel

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Fiction both reflects and creates the values of its time. In the eighteenth century, marriage was regarded as every woman’s vocation and the novel often reinforced this conviction. “Only leave me <em>myself</em>,” the heroine’s plea in Richardson’s <em>Clarissa</em>, laments the dependent position of women in the age. However, the novel also influenced the self-perception of eighteenth-century women in a positive way, Brophy asserts, by admiring their intelligence, by condemning sexual transgressions in and out of marriage, and, most important, by placing women at the center of their own stories, as heroines in their own right.

The abundant primary materials and straightforward writing in <em>Women’s Lives and the Eigtheenth-Century English Novel</em> make this a book of interest to scholars of social and cultural history and to students of the novel.