ABSTRACT
Margaret Doody is one of the most versatile critics and scholars of eighteenth-century literature, with important books on Richardson, eighteenth-century poetry, Frances Burney, and the history of the novel to her name (see Introduction to The English Novel Volume I: 1700 to Fielding, pp. 11-12). She is also one of the most influential feminist critics in the Anglo-American mode. This essay represents two of her strengths as a feminist critic. In its descriptive dimension, it greatly expands the reader's knowledge of the range and kind of novels by women in the later eighteenth century (the thoroughness of the descriptions necessitates some editing of plot summary and quotations). For example, she claims that Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783-85) is the first fully developed English gothic novel and the first historical novel in English. In its critical dimension, Doody's essay shows how the improbable devices associated with sentimental and gothic fiction - dreams, nightmares, madness - serve as means for women to articulate their peculiar pain and anxiety within patri archal society.
