Reading Daughters' Fictions 1709–1834
Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth

Historically based examination of the father-daughter bond in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction.

Caroline Gonda (Author)

9780521023849, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 November 2005

312 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23 x 15.1 x 2 cm, 0.481 kg

"...the book offers a useful and lucidly written resource for critics interested in thoughtful ways to read the eighteenth century's fascination with its own evolving social structures." Julia Epstein, Modern Philology

It has been argued that the eighteenth century witnessed a decline in paternal authority, and the emergence of more intimate, affectionate relationships between parent and child. In Reading Daughters' Fictions, Caroline Gonda draws on a wide range of novels and non-literary materials from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to examine changing representations of the father-daughter bond. She shows that heroine-centred novels, aimed at a predominantly female readership, had an important part to play in female socialization and constructions of heterosexuality, in which the father-daughter relationship had a central role. Contemporary diatribes against novels claimed that reading fiction produced rebellious daughters, fallen women, and nervous female wrecks. Gonda's study of novels of family life and courtship suggests that far from corrupting the female reader, such fictions helped to maintain rather than undermine familial and social order.

Introduction
1. Fictions of accident? Representations of incest in Manley, Barker and Haywood
2. Amorous girls and tyrannical parents: Richardson and the limits of paternal authority
Interlude. A lady's legacy: Sarah Scott and tests of filial duty
3. Lessons of experience: Evelina and Camilla
4. Schedoniac contours: the sins of the father in Gothic fiction
5. Stepping out: from Elizabeth Inchbald to Mary Brunton
6. Her father's daughter: the life and fictions of Maria Edgeworth.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]