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Summary

The first chapter focuses on novels such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, and Frances Burney’s Camilla, in which a heroine repeatedly ends up dangerously alone with a man. This episode both resembles and threatens to derail the marriage plot. These episodes of getting lost re-tell the marriage plot not as a story of falling in love, but as a series of misadventures in which the heroine gets condemned as a “lost” or “fallen” woman. Earlier in the eighteenth-century novel, the heroine is likened to a prostitute as a result of her sexual desire. Toward the end of the century, the heroine’s resemblance to a “lost” woman no longer results from her stigmatized desire, but from her precarious social status as a woman being considered for marriage, which she is prohibited from fully acknowledging. Earlier subgenre novels anticipate readers who are prohibited from acknowledging and fulfilling their desires. The historically later episodes anticipate readers who are drawn to the subgenre as a means of alleviating their lack of autonomy.

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Chapter 1 - Ending Up Alone with a Man in the Eighteenth-Century Marriage-Plot Novel

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Chapter 1 - Ending Up Alone with a Man in the Eighteenth-Century Marriage-Plot Novel

Summary