Classic studies of English fiction and social life often depict romantic marriage and marriage novels as rising in tandem, with each propelling the other all the way to the moment of Jane Austen or even to the early twentieth-century era of modernist experiment and legal divorce. Capitalizing on this collection’s attention to micro-chronologies, this chapter, however, engages with a set of domestic fictions, by William Godwin, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, and others, that for a brief interval consciously dispensed with the premise that marriage was crucial for narrative completion. Widening the collection’s geographic focus, I consider this set of English works alongside the novels of the Swiss-French Germaine de Staël, an inclusion that helps underscore how some of the challenges posed in the 1800s to the narrative grammar of the novel originated with the French Revolution and with revolutionary jurists’ liberalization of the laws regarding marriage and its dissolution.

Chapter 3 continues the exploration of women’s weeping, turning to the novels of Frances Burney, particularly Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814). Burney is a writer who draws on scientific discourse in her depictions of both seeing and feeling, vision and tears. Representing affect in fluid form, she imagines emotional repression and expression as a blockage and flow of liquid, which, when it takes the shape of tears, become a means of exercising female agency. Affect also plays an integral role in processes of perception throughout Burney’s fiction, with her novels suggesting that seeing is always attended and informed by feeling. Her work thus engages with the sentimental both through literary convention and through philosophical foundation, as its depictions of eyes and tears suggest that feeling is as epistemologically valid as observation.

The final chapter of the book takes a different focus and works through a particular rhythm. The chapter seeks to explore the value at stake not in the possession itself, but rather in the relationship of possession the owner held with it. It wants to further understand why maintaining possession over time was so important and what it did in cultural and social terms. The chapter does so by focusing on a single novel, Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782). The novel is deeply concerned with questions of property and examines what happens when property and possessions are lost. As such, it offers an important lens through which to explore the value of keeping hold. The chapter particularly examines how maintaining possession of your things was important to the broader project so important within eighteenth-century culture: that of maintaining self-possession. We know that possessions were important to the construction and display of the self, and here we see how the loss of such possessions threatened that project.

The first chapter focuses on novels such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, and Frances Burney’s Camilla, in which a heroine repeatedly ends up dangerously alone with a man. This episode both resembles and threatens to derail the marriage plot. These episodes of getting lost re-tell the marriage plot not as a story of falling in love, but as a series of misadventures in which the heroine gets condemned as a “lost” or “fallen” woman. Earlier in the eighteenth-century novel, the heroine is likened to a prostitute as a result of her sexual desire. Toward the end of the century, the heroine’s resemblance to a “lost” woman no longer results from her stigmatized desire, but from her precarious social status as a woman being considered for marriage, which she is prohibited from fully acknowledging. Earlier subgenre novels anticipate readers who are prohibited from acknowledging and fulfilling their desires. The historically later episodes anticipate readers who are drawn to the subgenre as a means of alleviating their lack of autonomy.

The Vicar of Wakefield is a tale with marriage at its core. This chapter puts that preoccupation in historical and cultural context, accounting for the importance of the Whistonian controversy and Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753 as backdrops to a novel which does not merely reflect its time, but anticipates subsequent treatments of the institution of marriage in fiction.

Modern scholars have achieved consensus that Frances Burney was writing satire in her novels, acknowledging the range of Burney’s satiric targets and tones, and the merging and submerging of her satire with comedy, irony, melodrama, and sentimentalism. Yet Burney’s contemporary reviewers did not identify Burney as a satirist. In fairness, satire defies easy definition, and the status of satiric fiction when Burney was writing at the end of the eighteenth century was far less secure than at the beginning of the period. Furthermore, satire was gendered as male at the time; women were seen as the targets of satire, not its practitioners. So even when Burney’s reviewers and readers did recognize satiric elements in her work, she was seen as a sentimental novelist, a didactic novelist, a romantic novelist – as anything but a satirist. And Burney did not identify herself as a satirist either. In doing so, Burney was passing – hiding in plain sight as a satirist, defying the conventions of women writers and novelists of her time.

Chapter 2 reveals the frustrating and interminable process of revision for Frances Burney in a survey of all of her novels.Her first two novels, Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), reveal that she submitted to the actual and perceived criticisms of family and friends in ways that diminished her initial innovative aims, including the deletion of a scene containing satanic rites in her Cecilia manuscript.Burney’s last two novels evince a reversal in her revision practices and display her later-in-life tendencies toward verbal excess.Her post-publication revisions to Camilla (1796) show her inability to moderate repetitive characterization and Gothicize her text in the case of the tantalizingly unfinished third edition.As with her changes to later editions of Camilla, Burney’s planned revisions to The Wanderer (1814) were motivated by her dissatisfaction with negative reviews and her unwillingness to relinquish control of her novels.Her final revisions demonstrate her recognition of the never-ending potential of the early novel form.