Feminism and the Rise of the Novel

Feminist literary criticism, which first gained ground in the 1970s and 1980s, now informs a major strand of eighteenth-century novel studies. The work surveyed in this chapter has achieved several things. It has recovered and accounted for the aesthetic and historical significance of a large corpus of female-authored novels before Jane Austen. It has helped to explain the processes of canon formation by which these novels came to be excluded. It has appraised the representations of women in canonical fiction. And it has provided critiques of the gendered ideologies of the early novel, particularly its collusion in the cultural disenfranchisement of women, such as through its promotion of the private, ‘domestic’ sphere of cloistered femininity as a separate realm from the male ‘public’ sphere of political and economic activity. This chapter begins with the recovery efforts of the 1980s, moving to a section on romance and realism that reflects on the gendering of genre, then to studies that have elucidated the early novel’s gendered ideologies, and finally to competing accounts of the novel’s relationship to domesticity.