This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels offered several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the forms of possession open to those denied a full civic identity. Her wide-ranging study discusses the work of a variety of writers, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Mackenzie to Clara Reeve and Jane West.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Samuel Richardson and Georgic: Introduction; 1. Clarissa and the georgic mode; 2. Making meaning as constructive labor; 3. Wicked confederacies; 4. 'The work of bodies': reading, writing and documents; Part II. Pastoral: Introduction; 5. The Man of Feeling; 6. Colonial narratives: Charles Wentworth and The Female American; Part III. Community and Confederacy: Introduction; 7. Versions of community: William Dodd, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve; 8. Confederacies of women: Phebe Gibbes and John Trusler; Part IV. The Politics of Reading: Introduction; 9. The discourse of manliness: Samuel Jackson Pratt and Robert Bage; 10. The gendering of radical representation; 11. History, romance, and the anti-Jacobins' 'common sense'; 12. Jane West and the politics of reading; Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index.