Forms and Feelings in the Genre

This chapter explores the connections between novels of sensibility and Gothic novels in the later eighteenth century, focusing on Frances Sheridan, Sophia Lee, and Ann Radcliffe. Women throughout the eighteenth century were not constituted as full ‘subjects’ before the law, but were positioned through marriage as passive transmitters of property between men. This ontological status of fragmented subjectivity has been rightly identified as a key part of the ‘Female Gothic’; however, it emerges in earlier texts as well. Locating these texts in relation to legal discourses of ownership and inheritance, the chapter argues for the continuity of women’s experiences in novels of sensibility and the Gothic.