Are there 'male' and 'female' novels'?
Professor Barbara Benedict of Trinity College, Connecticut, USA, explored the fictions about fiction and gender during the late 18th century and the Regency at a talk at Chawton House Library.
According to Jane Austen’s hero in Northanger Abbey, "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” Yet from 1770 to the early 19th century, women were warned, scolded and ridiculed for being addicted to fictions purveying steamy sentiment,
Professor Barbara Benedict of Trinity College, Connecticut, USA, explored the fictions about fiction and gender during the late 18th century and the Regency at a talk at Chawton House Library. She asked whether novels 'by a lady' differ from those which are not, and how the gender of a reader shapes the reception of novels from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
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