The female libertine has long appealed to feminists committed to the flouting of social and sexual law, to the pursuit of personal and, in the case of women authors, professional independence. The facts of libertinism, however, tend to impede attempts to idealize this figure. Its aristocratic pedigree, its individualistic competitiveness, and its associations with violence and eroticized misogyny have rendered libertinism at best a vexed subject for critics and historians wanting to align it with feminist principles.

In Dangerous Women, Libertine Epicures, and the Rise of Sensibility, 1670–1730, Laura Linker attempts to find a way around this impasse by yoking libertinism and sensibility, “traditionally understood to be in opposition to each other” (1). Linker unites the two by paring each term down to the bone. Libertinism stands for a desire for freedom; sensibility, for physiological sensations linked to “emotional capacities” (6). The study’s introduction suggests that early writers of sensibility “looked to the already established models of French sensibilité and the Ovidian epistle to form their libertine heroines” (6). The third term shaping Linker’s model is “Lucretius”—particularly, Thomas Creech’s translation of De rerum natura, first published in 1682. In this translation, Linker claims, “the mind becomes a feeling entity and also … a feminized one” (5). Women writers, in particular, were drawn to Creech’s translation, for it allowed them to foreground emotional responsiveness as a central aspect of the libertine experience.

Chapter 1, “Lady Lucretius,” analyzes Dryden’s ambivalent treatment of the court of Charles II through a reading of Marriage à la Mode. For Dryden, Linker argues, the royal mistress signals the threat of political devolution. Where Dryden saw danger, Aphra Behn found opportunity. In chapter 2, “Lady Sensibility,” Linker explores the figures of Julia in The Lucky Chance and Isabella in The History of the Nun. The plight of these characters, she suggests, invites the reader to feel sympathy rather than condemn their adulterous/murderous impulses. Behn asks us to consider the challenges of marriage in the cases of both Isabella and the Duchess of Mazarin, upon whom Isabella’s character, Linker claims, is modeled. “The Humane Libertine” (chap. 3) continues this argument, suggesting that Catherine Trotter’s heroines elicit a compassionate response. Chapter 4, “The Natural Libertine,” reads Delarivier Manley’s Rivella as autobiography. In Manley/Rivella, Linker discovers a woman for whom the “virtuous mind and heart emerge as the most important characteristics” (105). The heroines of Behn, Trotter, and Manley, like their authors, remain “true to their passions” even as they find themselves martyred on the cross of social hypocrisy (98).

The book’s final chapter returns to a more familiar and darker female libertinism, reading Daniel Defoe’s Roxana as a narrative that warns us of the dangers that attend moral and spiritual degradation. Later readers compensated for the novel’s lack of closure, Linker argues, by taking Defoe’s didactic preface as a guide to the novel, reflecting a more general commitment to the censorship of transgressive women. The study’s conclusion tells the by-now familiar story of the female libertine’s decline. Once the novel came to associate sensibility with moral probity and chastity after 1740, the female libertine found herself at odds with prose fiction’s more strictly virtuous heroines.

Roxana reminds us of female libertinism’s less attractive features, closely associated with the “brutal” royal mistresses of Charles II’s court, who repeatedly serve as foils to Linker’s more “sensible” heroines in this study (98). Linker’s concern for women’s victimization as social subjects prevents this study from extending beyond the theme of discipline to consider what else is going on in the literature it reads. Recently, critical conversations have moved away from questions of women’s desire and its containment to a broader consideration of the political stakes governing the period’s representations. So, for example, Toni Bowers reads Manley’s Rivella not as autobiography but as an allegory of new-tory affiliation in her groundbreaking study, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 2010). The larger questions raised by Bowers and others take us back to the Hobbesian female libertines left untreated by Linker’s study (Aphra Behn’s Silvia, the (anti-) heroine of Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, comes immediately to mind). Rather than refusing their hard-hearted ambition, it behooves us to consider their engagement with the period’s political discourses and the grounds upon which they have been erected. To my mind, at least, it is the Hobbesian who takes us most directly to the central concerns of—and pleasures created by—libertine aesthetics and practices.