ABSTRACT
This chapter expresses that despite the political change wrought by the Revolution, women writers in nineteenth-century France treat the theme of inheritance in ways which have more in common with Celia's use of it than with Mélanie's. Women's inheritance will be seen above all as a metaphor for a self-sacrifice which must be accepted with resignation, where it is not welcomed with religious fervour. Yet women writers' representation of the female inheritance of sacrifice is, socially conservative as often as it challenges the status quo, with a whole genre of inheritance fiction being dedicated to the justification of women's disinheritance, and of their confinement to a life of self-sacrifice, privation, and withdrawal, as the 'heirs of darkness'. The chapter considers how the alternative sources might be located in avuncular figures. It examines that anxiety takes as its symbolic vehicle the theme of inheritance.
