Sister novelists: A comparative study of selected fiction by American and British women, 1797-1813

Recently a number of scholars have called for an examination of the affinities between British and American literature. Such affinities are especially evident during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when both cultures were marked by a pronounced debate on the abilities and condition of women. This dissertation investigates several novels written by the American authors Tabitha Gilman Tenney (1762--1837), Hannah Webster Foster (1758--1840), Rebecca Rush (1779--18??), and Judith Sargent Murray (1751--1820), comparing them to contemporaneous fiction authored by two British writers, Jane Austen (1775--1817) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759--1798). My purpose is to highlight the transatlantic affinities within female literary culture of this period, bringing attention to some lesser known figures from American literary history while presenting the more familiar British novels in a new light.;Chapter One examines the issue of gender and the interpretation of texts in Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) and Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801). While each novel often seems to mock examples of female misreading, it also undercuts this stereotype---ultimately challenging contemporary conservative conceptions of women readers.;In Chapter Two, I focus on the seduction tales in Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Foster's The Coquette (1797). Through their emphases on the critical role female friendship plays for their heroines, these texts call into question conventional societal assumptions about the seduced woman.;The third chapter explores the marriage market in Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Rush's Kelroy (1812). In these novels, Austen and Tenney complicate their representations of the status quo by highlighting the economic realities of the system's operation while negatively or ambivalently depicting characters who recognize these realities and tailor their behavior accordingly.;Chapter Four compares Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and Murray's Story of Margaretta (1798). Although these texts engage similar issues, including women's education and marriage, they suggest distinctly different conclusions. Murray's novella implies that changes can be made from within the existing system, while Wollstonecraft's text suggests that a revolutionary transformation of the status quo would be necessary to mitigate the numerous gendered injustices of her society.