Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

It has been argued that the eighteenth century witnessed a decline in paternal authority, and the emergence of more intimate, affectionate relationships between parent and child. In Reading Daughters' Fictions, Caroline Gonda draws on a wide range of novels and non-literary materials from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to examine changing representations of the father-daughter bond. She shows that heroine-centred novels, aimed at a predominantly female readership, had an important part to play in female socialization and constructions of heterosexuality, in which the father-daughter relationship had a central role. Contemporary diatribes against novels claimed that reading fiction produced rebellious daughters, fallen women, and nervous female wrecks. Gonda's study of novels of family life and courtship suggests that far from corrupting the female reader, such fictions helped to maintain rather than undermine familial and social order.