ABSTRACT
The Westminster Review published two articles in 1856 that called for reform of legal fictions about women and literary fictions by them. In July, it printed the Law Amendment Society’s report on the “Laws Relating to the Property of Married Women,” and in October, George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” appeared. Not only were their authors personally connected, but together these essays drew readers’ attention to the relationship between women’s property, women’s writing, and fiction’s potential to affect social reform. Most importantly, both expressed deep skepticism about the different uses to which fiction was being put in legal and literary venues, that is, about the procedural application of “fictions” that erase women’s legal identity on marriage and about the goals (and responsibility) of the novel to represent women’s experience.
