Reading Daughters' Fictions 1709-1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Eighteenth-century diatribes against novels claimed that reading fiction produced rebellious daughters, fallen women and female nervous wrecks. In Reading Daughters' Fictions, Caroline Gonda draws on a wide range of novels and nonliterary materials of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in order to examine changing representations of the father-daughter bond. She argues that domestic novels of family life and courtship, far from corrupting female readers, helped to maintain familial and social order.