Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel

(Hardback)

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What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common More than you might think.

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Zoe McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society's mind about rape culture and to reassure survivors they were not alone.

Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.

In an era that's clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway...

Author Bio

Zoe McGee has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and an MSt in Eighteenth Century Studies from the University of Oxford. She has spoken at conferences internationally and performs at very nerdy stand-up-comedy nights. She has worked as a university teacher and a bookseller.