Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740-1880: A 'Craving Vacancy'

Susan Weisser explores the ways in which four British novelists use and transform the theme of women's relation to sexual love in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Looking closely at novels by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and George Eliot, the author analyzes the moment in cultural history when gender roles, sexuality and literature meet to become a new ideology: one in which the discourses of sexuality and romantic love are seen as both constructive of female freedom and destructive of female identity.