Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The great disinheritance
- 2 Fathers and daughters
- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity
- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature
- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations
- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person
- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation
- 8 The importance of aunts
- 9 Family feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Fathers and daughters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The great disinheritance
- 2 Fathers and daughters
- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity
- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature
- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations
- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person
- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation
- 8 The importance of aunts
- 9 Family feeling
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The particular fatality that regulates a woman's lot in fiction is always bound up with fathers.
Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change, p. 175.What the novels helped to reinforce was the sense that [marriage] was the most important decision, really the only decision of any significance, that a daughter would ever have the chance to take; and that the success or failure of that decision was intimately bound up with the relationship which she had with her father.
Caroline Gonda, Reading Daughters' Fictions, p. 37.He … went straight to his desk, whence, taking out and untying the parcel, he opened the first volume [of Evelina] upon the little ode to himself, – “O author of my being! far more dear,” &c. He ejaculated a “Good God!” and his eyes were suffused with tears.
Frances Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney, vol. II, p. 137.The relationship between fathers and daughters was perhaps the relationship most deeply affected by the disinheritance of daughters, judging from the intense preoccupation with it in this period. Indeed, if the literature a society produces can be said to reflect its obsessions, eighteenth-century England was obsessed with fathers and daughters. Margaret Doody notes that “close relations between fathers and daughters were insisted on as never before” in eighteenth-century fiction and drama.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Novel RelationsThe Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818, pp. 77 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004