Eighteenth-Century Fiction

In Gone Girls, 1684–1901, Nora Gilbert centres the ubiquitous figure of the runaway female within the development both of the novel and of modern feminism. While Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction cogently argued that the private, middle-class domestic sphere depicted in fiction established that a woman’s place was in the home, Gilbert points out that these same novels frequently featured women who fled the home and sought agency beyond its walls. While, for decades, scholars have been writing about the trope of the “fallen women,” Gilbert turns our attention to “female characters ... who manage to run without falling” and novels that “paint female rebellion, resistance, and dissent in a daringly sympathetic light” (2). In brief, flight as fight (15). Gilbert demonstrates the range and varied permutations of the female runaway in novels over the course of roughly two hundred years through seven chronological chapters, each one devoted to a different genre of fiction: amatory fiction, the novel of sensibility, gothic fiction, the novel of manners, provincial fiction, sensation fiction, and the “New Woman” novel. Carefully attending to the conventions of each genre and offering examples from multiple (largely canonical) practitioners, Gilbert persuasively tracks how fictional forms engaged, over time, the changing political and social contexts that shaped cultural ideas about women’s autonomy. Gilbert guides readers to privilege novels’ messy, radical “middles”—typically where the runaways take flight—rather than their conservative, “moral-of-the-story” endings, where the runaway is punished or recuperated into domesticity.

The first chapter of Gone Girls revisits novels by “the fair Triumvirate of Wit,” Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Gilbert argues that the fiction of these earliest professional women writers encourages readers to approve the moral character of female runaways and sympathize with their plights. Gilbert further argues that, given these authors’ autonomous status (unmarried, wage-earning) and scandalous reputations, an “author/fugitive [End Page 724] dialectic” reverberates in their novels. With the female runaway, Behn, Manley, and Haywood may well have been “touching upon ... mediated version[s]” of their own life stories (28). I find Gilbert less persuasive on this point, for (as she admits) biographical information about these authors is somewhat scant and often unverifiable. The case for an “author/fugitive” dialectic, as a result, is too speculative.

Chapter 2 examines Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa as a lodestone to the female novelists who published in its wake. Gilbert argues that sentimental novelists Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Sarah Scott follow Richardson’s lead in defending fugitive female protagonists against the accusations of audaciousness and indecency that dogged their amatory-fiction predecessors (12). And importantly, Gilbert points out, they did so without turning their runaway heroines into martyrs (53). Similarly, chapter 3 tracks Mary Wollstonecraft’s and Frances Burney’s engagements with the paradigmatic runaway-female plots of Ann Radcliffe. For Wollstonecraft and Burney, the gothic novel provides a vehicle for a more explicitly political positioning of the female fugitive; she runs from the horror of unjust imprisonment, from the Reign of Terror, from the abuses of coverture and jurisprudence.

Chapters 4 and 5 take up mid-century realist novels, focusing on the novel of manners and on provincial fiction respectively. Beginning with a discussion of Jane Austen, Gilbert establishes a new pattern in fictional approaches to female runaways. Now relegated to the sidelines, the fugitive might seem to provide a foil to the protagonist, a cautionary tale for the heroine who stays put. However, Gilbert argues, just because the runaway is judged or condemned—viewed as “fallen”—within the world of the novel does not mean that readers should feel the same. Rather, these female fugitive plots establish similarities between the “good-girl” protagonist and the “bad-girl” secondary character, “especially when it comes to their analogous harboring of deep-seated fugitive desires” (96). The formula Austen establishes suggests “that the line between shamefully fallen and admirably upright women is significantly slimmer than the social world may think or want it to be” (96). Chapter 5 brings us out of the drawing room and into the wilderness; in the provincial or regional novel, the female fugitive is a Lilith figure, Gilbert finds. Fuelled by intense feelings for a specific landscape, she embodies “female resentment, rebellion, and an unapologetic willingness to ‘fly away’” (125). [End Page 725]

From Lilith in the landscape Gilbert turns to sensation villainess and “New Woman” firebrands. Chapter 6 focuses on three types of female mobility—social, legal, and locomotive—to tease out the full implications of female flight in sensation fiction. One recurrent pattern emerges: the transgressive fugitive is guilty “of infiltrating a domestic space she is not legally or morally authorized to enter,” but she does so “only after she has actively fled from a domestic space to which she was previously, discontentedly consigned” (153). The novels taken up here—Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Wilkie Collins’s No Name—delve into the moral complexity of their female protagonists, refusing to either vilify or celebrate their rebellion. The threat of fugitive protagonists in New Woman novels, Gilbert argues in chapter 7, lies in the genre’s explicit feminism. The novels reflect an era that has experienced educational, vocational, and familial reforms that benefitted women; accordingly, New Woman runaways bolt with much less fear of punitive consequences for their actions.

Gilbert finds that

the runaway-woman plot gradually came to have less and less cultural purchase ... as women gained ever more legal, political, and familial rights ... there was simply less of a need for them to stage their departures from home secretively or surreptitiously.

(197–98)

In her epilogue, Gilbert makes good on the promise of her book’s title, briefly examining runaway women in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Hollywood films, including the 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl. It is an entertaining close to a thoughtful, meticulously argued, well-researched book that was a pleasure to read from start to finish. [End Page 726]