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What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think.
Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society’s mind about rape culture – and to reassure survivors they were not alone.
Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.
In an era that’s clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway…
‘Zoë McGee combines righteous feminist anger and flawless analysis, demonstrating not only how to read centuries old literature but why it remains so important that we do.’
Helena Kelly, author of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical
‘In this remarkable, moving and beautifully written book, Zoë McGee charts a new path – from the eighteenth century to the present – for stories of women and consent. Rarely have the novels of two centuries ago so jumped off the page and into our lives as in Courting Disaster.’
Devoney Looser, author of Wild for Austen
‘By turns witty, hard-hitting and compassionate, McGee explores how the eighteenth-century courtship novel from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen anticipates and thoroughly illuminates our modern debates about sexual violence, victimisation, trauma, credibility and consent. Courting Disaster reveals the key role that writing and storytelling play in the ongoing battle against sexual violence, and convincingly demonstrates that literature can change our lives and better our future’ .
Robert Morrison, author of The Regency Revolution
'Beginning in a university consent workshop and finishing with an icy nod towards the White House, McGee takes the reader by way of incels, tradwives, Sarah Everard, Brock Turner, Elliot Rodger and more. So far, so righteous. But Courting Disaster also presents itself as a critical study of eighteenth-century novels, aiming to examine them for the modern reader through the lens of consent.'
Sophie Coulombeau, Times Literary Supplement
'With more memoirs being published regarding the treatment of young women by powerful men,
this book is now more relevant than ever. What were authors in the time of Jane Austen, and
Jane Austen herself, writing between the lines of their novels, taking a stand against similar
issues?'
Rebecca Williams, The Jane Austen Society newsletter
Introduction
Part I: Consent
1 Clarissa, or The Perfect Victim Myth
2 Cecilia, or Credit and Credibility
3 Jane Doe, or Misreading the Room
Part II: Innocence
4 Ophelia, or Resisting the Unknown
5 Camilla & Eugenia, or What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
6 Evelina, or The Value of Virginity
Part III: Violence
7 Anon., or The Context of the Courtroom
8 Mary, or Violating Convention
9 Theodora & Dorothea, or The Bystander Effect
Part IV: Marriage
10 Elinor, or Honouring Engagements
11 Fanny, or The Price of Refusal
12 Anne, or Negotiating the Future
Conclusion
Index