If adventures will not befall a young woman in her own village, she must seek them abroad.’ And with Northanger Abbey's opening axiom echoing in my mind, I set out from the Highlands of Denver to explore visuality and its intriguing inherence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century British women's novels. Visuality, which functions as a continuum linking visual and verbal modes of communication and understanding, empowered women novelists at a time when selfexpression was particularly constrained for their sex, allowing them to control the gaze and speak through pictures. My analysis of the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney demonstrates that visuality provided them with a coded methodology capable of depicting and negotiating the ways in which women ‘should’ see, appear and think in a society in which the reputation was image based.

I have relished writing a book that offers fresh insights into a particularly beguiling chapter in British literature. My research unfolded in a small, teastocked room in St Andrews that though draughty, featured a mesmerizing view of the mercurial North Sea, with its frothy tempests and righteous rainbows. Like the Scottish weather, my doctoral studies were a subject of total immersion and the substance of which novels are made. My quest for understanding the dynamics between the visual and the verbal, the ‘seeable’ and the describable in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 prompted productive pilgrimages to a number of key destinations: Chawton House Library, Jane Austen's House Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Royal Academy of Arts, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Libraries, King's College (Cambridge) Library, Blenheim Palace, King's Lynn, the Musée Jacquemart- André, the Château de Malmaison and even Buckingham Palace. Perhaps nothing could have surpassed the thrill of speaking at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge's Pride and Prejudice bicentenary conference, which culminated in a proper Regency ball led by renowned dance master Stuart Marsden.

I am thankful for the scholars, writers, artists and actors who, directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly, helped me find my path – a path that straddles literature, art, strategic communications and international relations.