The proper lady
Man's discourse, woman's heart : Mary Wollstonecraft's two vindications
Love's skirmishes and the triumph of ideology
"My hideous progeny" : the lady and the monster
"Ideal and almost unnatural perfection" : revising Mary Shelley
Ideological contradictions and the consolations of form : the case of Jane Austen
"The true English style"
Conclusion

A brilliant, original, and powerful book...This is the most skillful integration of feminism and Marxist literary criticism that I know of." So writes critic Stephen Greenblatt about The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey's study of the struggle of three prominent writers to accommodate the artist's genius to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal of the modest, self-effacing "proper lady." Interpreting novels, letters, journals, and political tracts in the context of cultural strictures, Poovey makes an important contribution to English social and literary history and to feminist theory