Both literacy and the production of printed material greatly increased during the eighteenth century (Raven 5). Also during this period women came to be associated with home and children in a new, narrower way than in previous centuries (Vickery 4). This shift was especially pronounced in the middle classes where many women were no longer expected to partake in the running of the family business or to do the majority of household labour (Porter 29). Women, in the popular conduct literature of the period were taught to value and develop meekness, submissiveness, reserve, delicacy, gentleness and sympathy (Brophy 8-11). There was no perceived need for educating women beyond household duties and accomplishments such as needlework and the piano for those of the middle and upper class. Indeed an advanced education was often perceived as a handicap to be kept “a profound secret, especially from men” (qtd. in Augustin 11). Basic literacy however was a skill taught to most middle and upper class women and, due to the combination of this increased literacy with increased leisure time literate women became an important consumer of print material. In particular the novel, a new distinguishable type of literature during the eighteenth century, came to be associated with “‘the young, the ignorant and the idle,’ and especially the female” (Pearson 196).

During the eighteenth century critics were still attempting to define what exactly a novel was and what it meant to the public (Nixon 40). The concern about novel reading reached across both genders with critics still testing the boundaries of such a new print form which claimed a relationship to reality that previous fictions had not (Taylor 11-12).  Many were concerned that novel reading would “sully the Fancy, over heat Passion, and awake Folly” as William Darrell, a conduct book author wrote of the novel (qtd. in Tague 65). There was overall a great concern regarding the power of fiction to encourage improper action in real life (Nixon 39).

In general women’s reading of novels, according to those who aimed to condemn them, could lead to escapism, corrupt sexuality, discontent and even insanity (Pearson 105).  Part of the concern was that reading was largely a private activity removed from all the perceived roles of a woman, and since novel reading was generally done for pleasure the act was seen as practically masturbatory (108). There was also a concern that women, especially young women would not be able to separate fact and fiction and therefore expect life to be like novels which “glamorized romantic experience” and could “soften and mislead the Understanding” (Augustin 31, Vickery 41 and Tague 66). Women were not given the credit of being able to be active readers; instead they were seen as passive readers, collapsing “reality with imaginative fiction” (Binhammer 5). A third concern was that a woman was made sexually vulnerable while “inflamed with the rhapsodies of novels” (Pearson 82). Novels are full of women who make poor sexual choices, either in or out of the bounds of marriage because their judgement is impaired by fiction and in novels of the eighteenth century it is during scenes of reading that women are often sexually assaulted (Pearson).

Those who spoke in praise of the didactic qualities of novels drew both on the relationship to reality and the more lewd content to suggest that women could “learn from another woman’s experience about sexual impropriety without experiencing the dangers of first hand carnal knowledge” (Binhammer 5). In Erasmus Darwin’s conduct book of 1797 he wondered “… how can young women, secluded from the other sex from their infancy, form any judgement of men, if they are not to be assisted by such books…?” (qtd. in Augustin 31).

Reaction to the novel and novel reading women is marked by extreme ambiguity, even among single commentators. Of course these very attacks on novels “paradoxically asserted the novel’s centrality to the literary production” (Binhammer 3). That there were suitable and unsuitable novels was understood by the majority of critics by the end of the eighteenth century and in the Romantic period critics weren’t questioning whether novels in general were immoral but trying to discern which ones should be condemned as such.
Works Cited
Augustin, Sabine. Eighteenth-Century Female Voices: Education and the Novel. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004. Print.
Binhammer, Katherine. “The Persistence of Reading: Governing Female Novel-Reading in Memoirs of Emma Courtney and Memoirs of Modern Philosophers.” Eighteenth-Century Life 27.2 (2003). Project MUSE. Web. 14 February 2012.
Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen. Women’s Live and the 18th-Century English Novel. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991. Print.
Nixon, Cheryl L. Introduction. Novel Definitions: An Anthology of Commentary on the Novel, 1688-1815. Ed. Nixon. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009. 15-57. Print.
Pearson, Jacqueline. Women’s Reading In Britain 1750-1835: A dangerous recreation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.
Porter, Roy. English society in the eighteenth century. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990. Print.
Raven, James. “The Book Trades.” Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays. Ed. Isabel Rivers. London: Leicester UP, 2001. 1-34. Print.
Tague, Ingrid H. Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690-1760. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002. Print.
Taylore, John Tinnon. Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760- 1830. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1943. Print.
Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman’s Daughter: women’s lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Print.