Review: Gone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Nora Gilbert Available to Purchase

Nora Gilbert’s Gone Girls, 1684–1901: Flights of Feminist Resistance in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Novel arrives at just the right time to help revitalize feminist criticism, one of the most established, yet lately somewhat sidelined, methods of literary scholarship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. Pushing ahead topically while looking over the shoulder to reckon with some of the field’s most important critical forerunners, Gone Girls contributes to the noticeable uptick in recent stand-alone works interested in how heteropatriarchal historical configurations shaped the novel form, a critical gesture doubtless reawakening in response to the expansion of global popular feminist sentiment during the 2018 heyday of the #MeToo movement and the subsequent, and ferociously efficient, backlash to fourth-wave feminism. Though Gilbert began to work on this study some ten years ago, its foundational insight that there exists a literary tradition spanning more than two hundred years in which women characters flee...