SOURCE: "The Courtship Novel: Textual Liberation for Women," in her The Courtship Novel 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1991, pp. 11-24.

In this essay, Green discusses early courtship novels written by women within their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.

However enlightened our understanding of patriarchy, when we thumb back through eighteenth-century conduct books we expect to find a language of containment and circumscription that preempts female hopes and desires—the monitory gesture, uplifted forefinger, and glowering brow, usually belonging to male conduct writers. A line from the Reverend John Bennet's Letters to a Young Lady (1792) conveys the stereotypic patriarchal attitude: "If I was called upon to write the history of a woman's trials and sorrows, I would date it from the moment when nature pronounces her marriageable."¹ Addressing boarding-school students, Bennet outlines a bleak prospectus for a woman's life—coextensive with her body, woman's history...