Overview

In Gone Girls, 1684-1901, Nora Gilbert argues that the persistent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of 'home' played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. For as much as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel may have worked to establish the private, middle-class, domestic sphere as the rightful (and sole) locus of female authority in the ways that prior critics have outlined, it was also continually showing its readers female characters who refused to buy into such an agenda--refusals which resulted, strikingly often, in those characters' physical flights from home. The steady current of female flight coursing through this body of literature serves as a powerful counterpoint to the ideals of feminine modesty and happy homemaking it was expected officially to endorse, and challenges some of novel studies' most accepted assumptions. Just as the #MeToo movement has used the tool of repeated, aggregated storytelling to take a stand against contemporary rape culture, Gone Girls, 1684-1901 identifies and amplifies a recurrent strand of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British storytelling that served both to emphasize the prevalence of gendered injustices throughout the period and to narrativize potential ways and means for readers facing such injustices to rebel, resist, and get out.

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9780198876540

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Reviews

a fast-paced study ... [Gilbert's] fetching descriptions of this underexamined narrative feature make a compelling contribution * TLS, Devoney Looser *

a fast-paced study ... [Gilbert's] fetching descriptions of this underexamined narrative feature make a compelling contribution * TLS, Devoney Looser * This is a persuasive reading of a pervasive figure...Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice *

"Gone Girls will inspire some of its readers to bolt directly back to eighteenth - and nineteenth - century novels that, as the author eloquently puts it, ""remind us of the radical, often underestimated potency of running to break free"". * Devoney Looser, The Times Literary Supplement *"

a fast-paced study ... [Gilbert's] fetching descriptions of this underexamined narrative feature make a compelling contribution * TLS, Devoney Looser * This is a persuasive reading of a pervasive figure...Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * Choice * Gone girls, then, through Gilbert's model of ""flight as fight"" continue to make their presence felt even in their absence--an effect that Gone Girls, too, has upon its readers, eliciting and complicating our sympathies. Just as the gone girls of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels continue to impact other characters and readers, Gone Girls will keep influencing our reading of histories of the novel and feminist movements well after we close the final page. * Brianna Beehler, EuropeNow *

Author Information

Nora Gilbert is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Texas, where she jointly specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and twentieth-century American film. She is the author of Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Censorship, and the Benefits of Censorship (2013) and has published articles in such journals as PMLA, Film & History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Review, Eighteenth-Century Life, and JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory. Since 2017, she has served as editor-in-chief of Studies in the Novel.

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