Reading Daughters' Fictions 1709 1834

Eighteenth-century diatribes against novels claimed that reading fiction produced rebellious daughters fallen women and female nervous wrecks. In Reading Daughters'' Fictions Caroline Gonda draws on a wide range of novels and nonliterary materials of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in order to examine changing representations of the father-daughter bond. She argues that domestic novels of family life and courtship far from corrupting female readers helped to maintain familial and social order.