Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. A Feminized Genre -- 1. The Courtship Novel: Textual Liberation for Women -- 2. Eliza Haywood: A Mid-Career Conversion -- 3. Mary Collyer: Genre Experiment -- Part II. Feminist Reception Theory -- 4. Early Feminist Reception Theory: Clarissa and The Female Quixote -- 5. Charlotte Lennox: Henrietta, Runaway Ingenue -- 6. Frances Moore Brooke: Emily Montague's Sanctum Sanctorum -- Part III. The Commodification of Heroines -- 7. The Blazon and the Marriage Act: Beginning for the Commodity Market -- 8. Fanny Burney: Cecilia, the Reluctant Heiress -- Part IV. Educational Reform -- 9. Richardson and Wollstonecraft: The "Learned Lady" and the New Heroine -- 10. Bluestockings, Amazons, Sentimentalists, and Fashionable Women -- 11. Jane West: Prudentia Homespun and Educational Reform -- 12. Mary Brunton: The Disciplined Heroine -- Part V. The Denouement: Courtship and Marriage -- 13. Courtship: "When Nature Pronounces Her Marriageable -- 14. Maria Edgeworth: Belinda and a Healthy Scepticism -- 15. Jane Austen: The Blazon Overturned -- Conclusion -- Chronology of Courtship Novels -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- W.

The period from her first London assembly to her wedding day was the narrow span of autonomy for a middle-class Englishwoman in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many women, as Katherine Sobba Green shows, the new ideal of companionate marriage involved such thoroughgoing revisions in self-perception that a new literary form was needed to represent their altered roles. That the choice among suitors ideally depended on love and should not be decided on any other grounds was a principal theme among a group of heroine-centered novels published between 1740 and 1820. During these decades, some two dozen writers, most of them women, published such courtship novels. Specifically aiming them at young women readers, these novelists took as their common purpose the disruption of established ideas about how dutiful daughters and prudent young women should comport themselves during courtship. Reading a wide range of primary texts, Green argues that the courtship novel was a feminized genre -- written about, by, and for women. She challenges contemporary readers to appreciate the subtleties of early feminism in novels by Eliza Haywood, Mary Collyer, Charlotte Lennox, Samuel Richardson, Frances Brooke, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West, Mary Brunton, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen -- to recognize that these courtship novelists held in common a desire to reimagine the subject positions through which women understood themselves.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.