ABSTRACT
This book attends to a much misunderstood fi gure: the female reader within the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century novel. While historians of reading have focused increasingly on ‘real’ readers in this period, less notice has been given to the variety of reading practices employed by the reader within the text. The female reader, in particular, is ubiquitous in both the literature and the cultural commentary of the late eighteenth century, and the source of much debate and anxiety. According to the most widely-held view, novel-reading was dangerous and corrupting; potentially leading to sexual transgression. The young female reader was frequently portrayed as passive, vulnerable and impressionistic. Yet novels from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century invite a more complex view of women’s reading. Heroines of the period in fact display a wide range of reading practices, and do not simply ‘identify’ with fi ctional characters and situations. Broadening the term to include its metaphorical senses, this study shows that reading is an important skill for female characters to master. As she negotiates the confusing social world around her, the heroine must learn especially how to read, or interpret, the opposite sex. Her own reading of books is connected, though never straightforwardly, to the many complicated and diverse ways in which she reads the world. Though the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century novel foregrounds the diffi culties and uncertainties of interpretation, this book argues that it frequently represents the female reader not as passive and impressionable, but rather as active and creative.
