Cheryl Nixon

Ann Radcliffe's Commonplace Book: Assembling the Female Body and the Material Text

This essay explores the most substantive extant manuscript source written by Ann Radcliffe: a commonplace book she kept during the last months of her life, from May through November 1822, before she died on 7 February 1823. In addition to describing its material form, the essay transliterates sample passages from the book. Detailing her final illness and the medicinal prescriptions she took to combat her bodily ailments, the commonplace book is the only detailed primary source documentation of her life that exists. This little-studied source (held at the Boston Public Library) obviously provides crucial information pertaining to Radcliffes life, but, perhaps more importantly, it allows an exploration of how Radcliffe approaches the female body—specifically, the female body in pain. The essay argues that Radcliffe makes sense of that body by defining and ordering it through the multifaceted activity of assembling a hybrid text. The commonplace book charts the degradations and imprisonment of Radcliffes body, showing her interest in monitoring, delimiting and negotiating its daily movement—concerns that inform her construction of the Gothic heroine. Ultimately, the commonplace book becomes not just a record of the female body, but a textual model of it. The book shows Radcliffe shaping her body into text by giving it a non-narrative form; the novelist gives illness a form that replaces linear narrative structure with the open-ended activity of textual assemblage.

Regulating the Unstable Family: Eliza Haywood's Fiction and the Development of Family Law

This essay examines Eliza Haywood’s interrogation of the legal structuring of the family, arguing that her fiction articulates the need to serve the “best interests” of the child well before early modern British law enacts that goal. Haywood’s amatory fiction, including Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry (1719), The Rash Resolve: Or, The Untimely Discovery (1724), and The Distress’d Orphan, or Love in a Madhouse (1726), depicts the family’s mistreatment of the daughter-figure and anticipates the law’s as-yet unrealized potential to protect these most vulnerable of women. A comparison of Haywood’s fiction to the Court of Chancery’s equity case law, commentaries, and treatises reveals Haywood’s participation in now-forgotten debates about the rights and responsibilities that define the parent/child and, more specifically, the guardian/ward relationship. Guardianship allows Haywood to imagine and the law to enact interventions in the structuring of the family. This essay focuses on Haywood’s and equity’s definition of three parental powers over the child: the custody of the child, the care and maintenance of the child, and the management of an account of the child’s estate. In her fiction, Haywood consistently depicts the need for a more equitable structuring of the family—a structuring that the legal system of equity itself seems unable to uphold. By criticizing the law, specifically its need to create more caring family structures for the underage daughter, Haywood’s fiction anticipates new understandings of the family that would take equity another half-century to develop.

Criminal Acts and Controlling Figures: Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature

Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999. 195 pp.

Novel definitions : an anthology of commentary on the novel, 1688-1815

94.95. Lance Bertelsen, Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 232 pp.

Constructing the Innocence of the First Textual Encounter

49.95. Thomas M. Curley, Sir Robert Chambers: Law, Literature, and Empire in the Age of Johnson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 698 pp.

The orphan in eighteenth-century law and literature : estate, blood, and body

87.50. Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 218 pp.

Breaking the Rules of Discussion: Examples of Rethinking the Student-Centered Classroom

42.50. Netta Murray Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998. 217 pp.

Legal and Familial Recordkeeping: Chancery Court Records and Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House

89.95. Dieter Paul Polloczek, Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Sterne to Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 269 pp.

Maternal Guardianship by "Nature" and "Nurture": Eighteenth-Century Chancery Court Records and Clarissa

65.00.