Seductive Forms : Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740

Seductive Forms is a highly praised account of women's contribution to the `rise of the novel' in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England. The prose fiction of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood is considered as both providing erotic pleasure for its readers and scoring political points for its partisan (Tory) authors.

Historicist and feminist accounts of the `rise of the novel'' have neglected the phenomenon of the professional woman writer in England prior to the advent of the sentimental novel in the 1740s. Seductive Forms explores the means by which the three leading Tory women novelists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries challenged and reworked both contemporary gender ideologies and generic convention. The seduction plot provided Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood with a vehicle for dramatizing their own appropriation of the `masculine'' power of fiction-making. Seduction is employed in these fictions as a metaphor for both novelistic production (the seduction of the reader by the writer) and party political machination (the seduction of the public by the politician). This challenging and lively book also explores the debts early prose fiction owed to French seventeenth-century models of fiction-writing and argues that Behn, Manley, and Haywood succeed in producing a distinctively `English'' and female `form'' for the amatory novel.