Academic Research
Selected Journal Articles
“Rousseau’s British Readers and the Eloisa Effect.” Published in Book History 27.2 (Fall 2024)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s controversial interclass romance Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and its English translation Eloisa: Or, A Series of Original Letters (1761) were noteworthy commercial successes in mid-eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. By examining commentary by the novel’s first wave of British and Irish readers from 1760–1785, this article recovers how a publishing phenomenon provoked a diversity of reading responses and stoked debates regarding feminine propriety, social rank, and romantic autonomy. Alongside major figures in eighteenth-century literature and culture such as James Beattie, Frances Burney, Thomas Gray, Anna Seward, and Horace Walpole, two key clusters of readers are considered. The article contends that men of the middle ranks (including James Boswell, Richard Hurd, and William Warburton) were validated by the central romance, wherein an aristocratic woman recognizes the intellectual merit of an untitled suitor, while women across social ranks (Sarah Hurst, the Ladies of Llangollen) interpreted the text as supporting womens’ romantic autonomy.
“Jane Austen’s Inelegant Avatar: Proper Expression, Social Compliance, and Harriet Smith.” Published in Persuasions On-Line 45.1 (Winter 2024)
This paper studies impolite expression in Jane Austen’s comedy Emma (1815), arguing that high-ranking characters use vulgarisms to prescribe deferential behavior to less advantaged acquaintances and sustain Highbury’s conservative social hierarchy. My focus is on how these dynamics foreclose Harriet Smith’s bid at social elevation; as I show, though Harriet attempts to transcend her station through her speech, Emma uses similar terms to obstruct Harriet’s social mobility. Austen displays how language sustains conservative social hierarchies without championing these processes. After looking closely at Emma’s vulgarisms, this essay explores how Janeites consider Austen’s own expression by interrogating the widespread linking of Austen and Emma. By consulting Austen’s letters, novels, and accounts of her behavior, I argue that Harriet is an equally valid avatar of the author. I propose that implicit classism may influence the longstanding desire to link Austen with Emma rather than Harriet. In recognizing lexical and social links between Austen and Harriet, we recover another side of Austen, gain new understandings of speech and social sway in Austen’s novels, and amend issues with the way that worth and “proper” expression are adjudicated—both in Austen’s time and our own.
“The Gulf Between Heroine and Woman: How The Cry’s Oppositional Double Structure Challenges and Educates Readers.” Published in Women’s Writing 31.4 (Fall 2024)
This article argues that the key to the experimental novel The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754) by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier lies in the contrasting temporalities of the text’s two genres: the endless debate in the frame narrative and the resolved marriage plot narrated by the heroine Portia. By placing repetition and progression side by side, Fielding and Collier emphasize the gulf between the pain of lived experience and the illusory comfort provided by fictional convention. Amid eighteenth-century literary debates on whether didactic texts should favor realism or idealism, The Cry insists that truly educational novels must represent womanhood pragmatically – as rife with oppression, frustration, and repetition. Through formal features, the co-authors use pace and duration to force their audience to experience the pain of womanhood in real time, then propose a way forward through their heroine’s progressive neologisms. Drawing on Sarah Fielding’s literary criticism, responses to The Cry by eighteenth-century readers, and feminist theory, this essay examines how the novel critiqued the social utility of conventional domestic fiction and exposed the true experience of womanhood.
Doctoral Dissertation
The Debate Over Feminine Virtue: Womanhood, Book History, and Commercially Successful Fiction, 1750-1765 (2022) is the first dedicated study of commercially successful narratives about women published between 1750-1765. Based on strongly empirical research rooted in a stringent book historical framework, the project recovers once-popular fiction and analyzes this mass of largely unstudied material from a feminist critical perspective. Scholarship has consistently underestimated midcentury novels, usually viewing them as complacent texts about chaste and obedient women. However, when one examines the books that sold well at the time, a different story emerges. These narratives were a testing ground for new kinds of heroines and “good” women, an arena where readers could question social mores about gender and virtue.
The four chapters of this dissertation examine how popular novels considered womanhood in diverse and often critical ways. Chapter one introduces readers to the twenty-nine most commercially successful books about women published between 1750-1765 and describes the range of heroines and social arguments in mainstream texts. Chapter two examines the period’s most successful feminocentric novel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), translated into English as Eloisa (1761). Eloisa’s impassioned readers left behind a wealth of fascinating responses to the novel’s controversial subjects including premarital sex, interclass relationships, and love matches. Chapter three explores diametric treatments of womanhood and poetic justice in two novels: the genre-bending commercial failure The Cry (1754) by Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding, and Sarah Fielding’s modestly successful solo effort The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757). Chapter four recovers a fascinating subgenre that I term “Miss Adventures.” These were commercially viable comedies about courtesans and actresses who rebuff social mores yet are admired and rewarded. The coda concludes the project with a brief discussion of how popular literature could impact readers, especially women.
Ultimately, this dissertation reveals the tremendous scholarly rewards of studying commercially successful fiction. This material changes our view of the mid-eighteenth-century literary marketplace, reveals a mass readership’s preferences, and allows scholars to see the 1750s and 1760s as a critical and profoundly experimental period of literary history, especially regarding depictions of women and treatments of female experience.
Image Credit: “The Rival Favourites” and “Matrimonial-Harmonics.” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library Digital Assets Collection.