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Women's Lives and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Hardcover, First)
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Women's Lives and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Hardcover, First)
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Novels of the eighteenth century usually offer wedded bliss as a
reward to their heroines. How did these novels affect--and how were
they affected by--the women who were reading them? By drawing upon
thousands of unpublished documents from the era, written by more
than 250 women, Brophy creates a picture of the real lives of
eighteenth-century women and then examines the work of seven
novelists in relation to this portrait. Excerpts from letters,
diaries, and journals, written by women ranging from servants to
nobility, reveal the stages of feminine life in the 1700s: dutiful
daughter, courted maiden, obedient wife, and pitiful widow or
spinster. Their lives are assessed against those portrayed in the
works of seven novelists--five women (Sarah Fielding, Charlotte
Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Fanny Burney) and two men
(Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson). 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 myself," the heroine's
plea in Richardson's Clarissa, 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 Women's Lives and the Eigtheenth-Century English Novel
make this a book of interest to scholars of social and cultural
history and to students of the novel.
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