Unnatural Affections

"... compelling... One draws from Haggerty's very deft readings a strong understanding of the ways in which women writers worked to resist, with greater and lesser success, the increasing demand that gender relations be normalized by imagining ever more possibilities for deviance." —Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

George Haggerty examines the "unnatural" affections that abound in 18th-century novels. Their portrayal offered a complex understanding of the role of gender and the articulation of female desire during the age in which women novel writers came into their own. The novelists offered romantic friends, effeminized male partners, maimed heroines, paternal obsession, and lesbian couples—relations that defied cultural taboos of the time

GEORGE E. HAGGERTY is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form, and co-editor of Professions of Desire and essays on the sexuality and gender in works of the later eighteenth century.