Unhistoric Acts: Early Novels

Abstract

An important project of feminist historians has been to recover and valorise private or social history which traditionally has been treated as a footnote to the political history of ‘great’ men. As literary critics have noted, the domestic history of the private individual has long been available in ostensibly fictional form in the novel. Yet the social history represented in literature more often than not confirms the generalisations of political history, particularly in regard to the secondary and limited roles of women.