'Empire lost': Unstable terms in the language of female sexuality, political conquest, and literary authority, 1660 to 1765

As part of the broader process of developing a critical lexicon to interpret works by authors like Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Sheridan, this dissertation examines a specific narrative tactic common to these authors, which is a metaphoric interlocking deployment of the languages of politics and sexuality. This project disentangles compromises that women writers make to compete in the literary marketplace. Focusing on striking variations in the works of Behn, Montagu, Lennox, and Sheridan with additional glances toward John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Horace Walpole, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson throughout this project, I establish a self-conscious relationship between generic choice, gender conventions, political ideology, and authorial ambition. Because of these critical intersections between sexual conquest, political identity, geopolitical and gendered empire, and literary authority, similarities and connections emerge between texts as superficially divergent, both temporally and ideologically, as Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister and Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote. My dissertation isolates moments in which the vocabulary of conquest, empire, and power enters into female-authored texts to foreground patterns of sexual-political conquest in women's writing. The trajectory traced here diverges slightly but markedly from texts like Todd's The Sign of Angellica and Ballaster's more recent Seductive Forms by challenging the view that only the explicitly political writers---Behn and Manley during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle during the 1790's---critique and reform patriarchal ideology.;I have used the following chapter breakdown: "Sexuality, Politics, and the Codification of Female Conquest, 1660 to 1763"; "'Such Masculine Strokes in Me, Must not be Allowed': Narrative Conquest and Compromise in Aphra Behn"; "'Sense and Soft Meaning' in Unconventional Spaces: The Collapse of Genre in Aphra Behn's Later Works"; "'I am now got into a New World': Female Empire and Alterity in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Horace Walpole"; "'You, Ladies, have beside so many Ways to Conquer': Montagu, Lennox, Sheridan, and the Impossibility of Female Literary Community"; and "Finding a 'Reigning Queen': Frances Brooke's 'Empire of Hearts' and the Lost Empires of Behn, Montagu, Lennox, and Sheridan."...