SOURCE: Malina, Debra. “Rereading the Patriarchal Text: The Female Quixote, Northanger Abbey, and the Trace of the Absent Mother.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 2 (January 1996): 271-92.

In the following excerpt, Malina compares The Female Quixote and Northanger Abbey as “female” texts.

Would the veil in which Mrs. Tilney had last walked, or the volume in which she had last read, remain to tell what nothing else was allowed to whisper? No: whatever might have been the General's crimes, he had certainly too much wit to let them sue for detection.¹

Jane Austen

In reading, one encounters only a text, the trail of an absent author.²

Patrocinio P. Schweickart

In an attempt to create a community of women readers, writers, and critics who can construct a literary discourse amenable to feminist concerns, Patrocinio Schweickart proposes a gender-coded dual reading strategy. When reading “certain (not all) male texts,” feminists should invoke “a...