Women’s Sexuality
ECF virtual issue, February 2019
Curator Caroline Gonda, University of Cambridge
Introduction by Caroline Gonda: click here.
“’Tis NOVEL most beguiles the Female Heart.
Miss reads—she melts—she sighs—Love steals upon her—
And then—alas, poor Girl!—good night, poor Honour!”
George Colman’s Polly Honeycombe, A Dramatick Novel of One Act (1760) encapsulates the eighteenth century’s favourite cautionary tale about the seductive relationship between fiction and female sexuality. As the heroine’s thwarted father warns, making the link between novel reading and prostitution, “A Man might as well turn his Daughter loose in Covent-Garden as trust the Cultivation of her Mind to A CIRCULATING LIBRARY.” The immersive nature of prose fiction increased anxieties about its effects on impressionable women readers: not just what novels might teach them about the world, but how. The Eighteenth-Century Fiction archive provides a rich resource for scholars engaged in studying the complex and often vexed relations between fiction and women’s sexuality in this period.
Fiction has its own particular ways of producing, communicating, and transforming knowledge about sexuality, desire, and the body, as the articles in this virtual issue show. …
To read the full introduction by Caroline Gonda: click here.
©McMaster University, 2018.
ECF articles in the “Women’s Sexuality” virtual issue are available at the free-to-read archive:
The Whore’s Love
by Katherine BINHAMMER, ECF 20, no. 4 (2008): 507-34.
Into the Public: The Sexual Heroine in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and Mary Robinson’s The Natural Daughter
by Anne CLOSE, ECF 17, no. 1 (2004): 35-52.
The Politics of Seduction in British Fiction of the 1790s: The Female Reader and Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
by Claire GROGAN, ECF 11, no. 4 (1999): 459-76.
Mothers and Other Lovers: Gothic Fiction and the Erotics of Loss
by George HAGGERTY, ECF 16, no. 2 (2004): 157-72.
Faking It: Female Virginity and Pamela’s Virtue
by Corrinne HAROL, ECF 16, no. 2 (2004): 197-216.
Sir Charles Grandison: Richardson on Body and Character
by Juliet McMASTER, ECF 1, no. 2 (1989): 84-102.
Crossing Borders with Mademoiselle de Richelieu: Fiction, Gender, and the Problem of Authenticity
by Carolyn WOODWARD, ECF 16, no. 4 (2004): 573-601.
And one on Project MUSE:
Female Favouritism, Orientalism, and the Bathing Closet in Memoirs of Count Grammont
by Danielle BOBKER, ECF 24, no. 1 (2011): 1-30, HTML
Further Reading:
Allen, Regulus. “‘The Sable Venus’ and Desire for the Undesirable.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 51, no. 3 (2011): 667-91.
Andreadis, Harriette. “Re-configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire.” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 46, no. 3 (2006): 523-42.
Beynon, John C., and Caroline Gonda, eds. Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Binhammer, Katherine. The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Boe, Ana de Freitas, and Abby Coykendall, eds. Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
Brideoake, Fiona. The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy and the Legacies of Criticism. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017.
Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. London: Scarlet Press, 1993.
Haggerty, George E. Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Kittredge, Katharine, ed. Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
Lanser, Susan S. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Moore, Lisa L. Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
O’Driscoll, Sally. “The Lesbian and the Passionless Woman: Femininity and Sexuality in Eighteenth Century England.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 44, no. 2/3 (2003): 103-31.
Pearson, Jacqueline. Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Roulston, Chris. Narrating Marriage in Eighteenth-Century England and France. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.
Straub, Kristina. Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
And bonus ECF articles on this topic on Project MUSE:
Harrow, Sharon. “Having Text: Desire and Language in Haywood’s Love in Excess and The Distressed Orphan.” ECF 22, no. 2 (2009-10): 279-308.
Lee, Wendy Anne. “A Case for Hard-heartedness: Clarissa, Indifferency, Impersonality.” ECF 26, no. 1 (2013): 33-65.
Lubey, Kathleen. “Sexual Remembrance in Clarissa.” ECF 29, no. 2 (2016-17): 151-78.
As well as two more articles from the archive:
Bloom, Rori. “Privacy, Publicity, Pornography: Restif de la Bretonne’s Ingénue Saxancour, ou La Femme séparée.” ECF 17, no. 2 (2005): 231-52.
Miller, Nancy K. “Cover Stories: Enlightenment Libertinage, Postmodern Recyclage.” ECF 13, no. 2-3 (2001): 477-99.
Read other ECF virtual issues:
©McMaster University, 2019. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.