Life after Death

"Life After Death demonstrates that, from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Jane Austen's Emma, authors of the developing novel modified conventions for representing the widow to reflect and shape distinctly eighteenth-century responses to emerging capitalism, and to limit female participation in this new system." "In the first book-length study of the widow in the British novel, Karen Bloom Gevirtz reveals how this seemingly marginal character was in fact central to the period's efforts to establish gender roles within emerging capitalism. Court records of cases involving widows, and the papers of private charities, most of which are examined in print for the first time, contrast with novelistic depictions by showing how criminal and poor widows were treated by their contemporaries. Canonical and non-canonical novels such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Sarah Scott's Sir George Ellison, and Ann Radcliffe's masterpiece The Italian offer evidence of the period's wider economic consciousness by describing not just affluent widows, but also working widows, destitute widows, and criminal widows, populations that earlier authors generally overlooked." "Whether their interests lie with the novel, economics, gender roles, or the century that produced the French Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, ordinary and scholarly readers alike will find Life after Death illuminating and thought-provoking."--Jacket.