SOURCE: '"Romantic Friendship' and Patriarchal Narrative in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall," in Genders, Vol. 13, Spring, 1992, pp. 108-22.

Below, Haggerty suggests that Scott's Millenium Hall offers a narrative in which women escape the subjugated role assigned to them in eighteenth-century patriarchal literature and society.

The emergence of the novel as an outlet for female creativity in the middle of the eighteenth century has been richly and justifiably celebrated.¹ In addition to its obvious value as an educative and socializing tool, the novel, especially in its guise as "romance," offered women who were rigidly controlled in their personal lives the chance to experience the thrill of a courtship and marriage fraught with seemingly unlikely difficulties. The freedom that such novels offer, however, is in many ways illusory. In the first place, the "romance plot" itself is calculated to reinforce women's dependence on the male and on marriage for self-fulfillment...