Living her narrative: Writing heroines in the eighteenth-century novel

This study traces the emergence of the semi-autobiographical writing heroine in the eighteenth century. The exploration of this character illuminates an overlooked relationship between the two developing and prospering genres of the era: the novel and the autobiography. While critics have for the most part discussed the writing heroine in terms of reductive autobiographical readings, such a method neglects this heroine's illustration of the critical interplay between the autobiography and the novel genres in their nascent stages. This project reveals that eighteenth-century female authors incorporated elements of the emerging autobiographical genre within their fictional works not merely as a means of self-expression, but also in an attempt to help shape the novel form as it evolved.;This study of the heroine writer combines Catherine Gallagher's theory of the Nobody of the fictional novel with autobiographical and narrative theories to investigate the evolution of the semi-autobiographical heroine and her novel. In the first half of the eighteenth-century century the writing heroine participates in and celebrates the flexibility allowed in an open market system. In the second half of the century this figure confronts and challenges limitations that arise from the reformation of fiction that framed the novel as a more didactic form. I argue that the later eighteenth-century woman writer sets up her text to trigger her reader's assumptions of fictionality by including conventional plots of the reformed and feminine novel, such as the depiction of a heroine's courtship and marriage. However, as the semi-autobiographical heroine acts out these plot lines she presents for the reader a self-referential yet sympathetic representation of the author through a figure of the fictional Nobody. With the incorporation of the writing heroine, eighteenth-century female authors could simultaneously use and criticize generic and social conventions that they found limiting in the hopes of exposing such limitation.