Nora Gilbert’s Gone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminine Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel enriches the scholarly conversation by “recalibrat[ing] … the rise of the novel” (12) through a feminist lens. Gilbert argues that the “runaway-woman plot” (12), or moments when female characters take flight from oppressive domestic situations in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, depicts rebellion and resistance to the patriarchal order. Gilbert situates this rebellion in the “series of social, legal, and economic developments” (3) that occurred in this time period, such as the rise of the ideal of companionate marriage, which emphasizes the desire of the woman, and nineteenth-century legal reforms that assisted women socially and economically to refuse or leave an undesirable marriage. To reconceptualize the position of women within the long eighteenth century both diegetically and historically, Gilbert counters Nancy Armstrong’s argument in her foundational Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1990) that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels encouraged women to accept their position of power within the domestic sphere. Through the trope of flight from the home, Gilbert asserts that these novels promote a proto-feminist or feminist ideal.

To delineate the trope of the runaway woman, Gilbert carries out innovative readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels that deconstruct traditional paradigms within current scholarship on the novels. Foremost, Gilbert foregrounds exploration of the middle of the novel rather than the ending, which, in this time period, tended to embrace a heteronormative, conservative resolution. Following the lead of Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (2011), edited by Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles, Gilbert focuses on the liberatory potential of the narratives in the middle of the novel. Secondly, Gilbert takes up Deirdre Lynch’s injunction in “Social, Sexual, and Other Contracts in Eighteenth-Century Novels” (Modern Language Quarterly 80, no. 1 [2019]: 21–27) to follow Armstrong’s lead in emphasizing the cross influence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, deconstructing traditional periodization to explore transhistorical connections among texts. In Gone Girls, 1684–1901, Gilbert uses the convention of women in flight to reimagine the narrative terrain of the early novel in order to encompass more radical politics. Gilbert also reveals the longevity of the trope of the runaway woman by delineating its impact on contemporary culture through films that depict women running from the law or from judgment, most evident in the 2014 film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl (2012).

Gilbert manages the exploration of this wide swath of novels by moving through traditional generic categories: amatory fiction, sentimental fiction, the novel of manners, provincial fiction, gothic fiction, sensation fiction, and the New Woman fiction. Gilbert suggests that the amatory fiction of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood applauds women’s rejection of the restrictive domestic sphere through the female protagonist’s escape, often through her sexual exploits. Gilbert deepens this argument in noting that the authors’ own scandalous independence as self-supporting writers parallels the revolutionary flight of their protagonists. In exploring amatory fiction like Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684), Gilbert shifts critical attention from the seduction plot to a broader discussion of gendered power dynamics within the work, revealing the rebellion in the protagonist Silvia’s escape with her lover.

In contrast to amatory fiction, the sentimental genre emphasizes the chaste feminine ideal; for Gilbert, however, this ideal protagonist grants the author the moral authority to critique patriarchal power. Gilbert shows that in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), the protagonist alludes to Mary Astell’s feminist ideas of rights and liberty to justify her attempts to flee. For Gilbert, then, the import of Clarissa's continued possibility of flight overshadows the novel’s disturbing conclusion depicting an ostensibly punished victim of rape. Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Sarah Scott continue to attempt to shield the protagonist from the imputation of indecency while also presenting a “corrective” (57) to Richardson's novel by allowing the protagonist to thrive. Gilbert links the sentimental novel to the female gothic through the heightening of affect to embody the horror of women abused in the home. Expanding upon Kate Ellis’s examination of the gothic novel in Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1989), Gilbert reveals dangers of the domestic sphere that must be escaped in gothic novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Burney, and Ann Radcliffe.

When Gilbert turns to the nineteenth-century novel of manners, focusing on Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, she concedes that the genre, narrowly focused on social rules, seems ill-suited to supporting the violation of them. Reading against the grain once more, Gilbert suggests that the authors continue to question patriarchal power through the runaway woman trope by sequestering the character’s flight to a subplot. Gilbert suggests that Austen exploits the radical trope of the woman in flight to expose the oppressive nature of patriarchal society, pointing to Maria’s flight from her distressing marriage in Mansfield Park (1814), even though the rebellious character is harshly criticized for her impropriety by protagonist Fanny Price.

In the provincial novels of the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot, Gilbert argues that the runaway woman trope takes a prominent position once again, alongside the wild natural scenes in the drama, to represent the dangerous freedom these protagonists come to occupy. In a similar vein, Gilbert examines the sensation novel and the New Woman novel, both of which highlight protagonists who overtly critique and rebel against the patriarchal order. According to Gilbert, the sensation novel enhances the agency of the female protagonist through her quick movements in escaping the gothic horror of the domestic sphere, alluding to advances in women’s mobility through legal reforms and advancement in transportation during the period. The New Woman novel, a genre that brought together the “female gothic, melodrama and domestic realism” (173), echoes the amatory genre that Gilbert discusses in her first chapter in that the authors who wrote New Woman fiction held the feminist beliefs of the New Woman.

The comprehensiveness of Gone Girls, 1684–1901 reveals vital insight into the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. At times, this comprehensiveness is a hindrance, however. Viewing the runaway woman as sympathetic in every novel examined leads to some strained readings. The comprehensiveness of the study also emphasizes the lack of diversity in the novels in that the novels’ critiques, as Gilbert points out, tends to be non-intersectional (8).