Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660–1727 (1st ed. 2014)

This book shows how early women novelists from Aphra Behn to Mary Davys drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre.

Fascinated by the problematic idea of a unified self underpinning modes of thinking, female novelists innovated narrative structures to interrogate this idea.