The novel has always been closely tied to ideas about women, and this class will trace the history of a genre with a focus on gender. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the novel as either a teaching method or a dangerous distraction for women and young people, and we will examine the ways women writers navigated scandal and respectability in the romances of authors will Aphra Behn, in the sentimental and comic novel, and works of gothic terror by novelists like Ann Radcliffe. At the same time, we will look at the social, economic, and cultural conditions surrounding publishing, women's rights, and marriage through essays and journalism by writers such as Mary Astell, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Offered every 2-3 years.