Gone Girls, 1684-1901 Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel

In Gone Girls, 1684-1901, Nora Gilbert argues that the persistent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of 'home' played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. For as much as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel may have worked to establish the private, middle-class, domestic sphere as the rightful (and sole) locus of female authority in the ways that prior critics have outlined, it was also continually showing its readers female characters who refused to buy into such an agenda--refusals which resulted, strikingly often, in those characters' physical flights from home.

Nora Gilbert, Associate Professor of English, University of North Texas

Nora Gilbert is a professor of English at the University of North Texas, where she co-specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and twentieth-century American film. She is the author of Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Censorship, and the Benefits of Censorship (2013) and co-editor of Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice (2026). Her essays have appeared in such venues as PMLA, Film & History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Review, Eighteenth-Century Life, Screen, and Public Books. Since 2017, she has served as editor of Studies in the Novel.