Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740

by Ros Ballaster

Historicist and feminist accounts of the "rise of the novel" have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. Seductive Forms explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the "masculine" power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). The book also explores the debts early prose fiction owes to French seventeenth-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeeded in producing a
distinctively "English" and female "form" for an amatory novel.

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 1992

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did skim read a fair amount of this as not every chapter was relevant to my research but I found it to be a very accessible introduction to debates surrounding women's amatory fiction of the period and it did talk about the two women of my research project, Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood in some depth. I will definitely come back to this when I start the officially writing of my dissertation and there is a chapter that I would like to revisit (just for fun) that covers some of the satirical representations of Eliza Haywood by male writers of the time.

[Jennevieve Culver · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ros lost me a bit at points but slay I guess