Women and property in the eighteenth-century English novel /

Representations of women and property in 18th-century fiction reveal much about cultural concerns of the time. London (Univ. of Ottawa) looks at conflicting interpretations of women and property in male and female-authored fictional works, interpretations based on alignments of property (the ownership of things) with propriety ("the possession of one's own person"). The author uses both a historical model--classical republicanism and bourgeois individualism--and a literary model--pastoral and georgic--to establish definitions of selfhood through references to property. She devotes part 1 to Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela; part 2 to Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, Edward Bancroft's The History of Charles Wentworth, Esq., and the anonymously authored Female American; part 3 to works by William Dodd, Sarah Scott, and Clara Reeve; and part 4 to the politics of reading during the radical decade of the 1790s. London's chapter on the novels of Jane West offers a fascinating analysis of political and harmonizing impulses in a writer who sought to educate female readers about "things as they are." With its exceptionally strong scholarship, this book will surely deepen understanding of some less-known but remarkable works of the period. In addition, London's notes are a gold mine of useful analysis. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. S. Pathak; Virginia Commonwealth University