My dissertation, Testimonies of Sexual Harm in the Romantic-Era Sentimental Novel, argues that women-authored novels of the Romantic era redefined rape through a sentimental mode of narration that I term “testimony” because of its reliance on recalled first-person experience. The term deliberately echoes juridical language but is ultimately unmoored from legal modes of identifying and understanding sexual harm. I do this because this is what I’ve found the literature itself to be doing: the women-authored novels that my dissertation engages present sexual harm exclusively through the female victim’s narration of experience, and the texts only ever register rape through her narration of feeling and personal judgments of violation. These narrations often work antithetically to, if not decidedly outside of, contemporary legal logics of prosecuting and identifying rape.  

Romantic literature’s openness to women’s sentimental testimonies of sexual harm is historically significant. In the early to mid-eighteenth century, literary depictions of rape were often framed as comedy, and legally, rape was treated as a crime against male property. By contrast, the Romantic-era sentimental novel portrayed rape as a violation of women’s bodily and psychological dignity, with notable considerations of women’s harms across race and class. This literary culture coincided with legal reforms that gave increasing weight to women’s narrations of harm in actual historical rape trials, and for the first time, successful prosecution hinged on the voice of the woman herself. By the Victorian era, however, evidentiary logic displaced the authority of female testimony, privileging physical proof of harm and male character witness statements. Given surrounding socio-historical contexts, Romantic-era novels’ relative openness to women's testimonies of harm, and their valorization of sentimental narration of private experience, present a brief but radical moment in literary and legal history. My dissertation ultimately argues that women-authored sentimental novels of the Romantic era self-consciously use fiction to not only theorize rape as a gendered harm, but to teach readers how to trust and sympathize with women’s narrations of sexual harm. 

My project contributes to literary scholarship in three major ways. First, it extends the work of feminist scholars such as Eleanor Ty, Claudia Johnson, and Mary Poovey, who have revalued women’s contributions to the novel in the long eighteenth century. While literary history has often centered male artistic production in its narratives about the rise of the novel as a dominant cultural form, my project restores women’s authorship to that story. Second, it participates in recent critical efforts by Charlotte Sussman and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson to reconsider the merits of the Romantic-era novel in particular, as it has historically been dismissed as a failed literary experiment in the broader history of the novel. Finally, it contributes to what feminist critics Erin Spampinato and Doreen Thierauf term New Rape Studies, which seeks to redefine rape beyond the limits of legal discourse. Building on feminist legal scholars such as Catherine MacKinnon and Janet Halley, who have exposed the limitations of consent- and intent-based definitions of rape, New Rape Studies calls for a radical expansion of what we consider to be rape, and centering of analysis on the text’s depiction of the phenomenology of sexual harm. 

The dissertation is organized into four chapters. The first examines Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792), one of the first novels to engage directly with the ideological controversies of the French Revolution. Critics have often treated the novel’s twin storylines—Desmond’s observation of Geraldine Verney’s abusive marriage and his account of the Revolution—as parallel but separate concerns. I interpret these features as deeply interrelated, arguing that Desmond uses Enlightenment and sentimental discourses on tyranny and cruelty to theorize marital rape. This was remarkably progressive, as married women were legally considered their husbands’ property and perpetually consenting to sexual advances—in fact, laws recognizing marital rape as a criminal harm did not emerge until the 1990s. While many scholars have read Desmond as a passive witnessing and sentimentalism as signs of political ambivalence, I join feminist critics like Claudia Johnson in reclaiming sentimentalism as a mode of political feeling and contend that the novel dramatizes Desmond’s spectatorship to suffering to develop a feminist ethic of sympathetic witnessing. 

My second chapter examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798). Though Wollstonecraft is often remembered for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which cautions against novel-reading because it inflames women’s passions and fosters romantic delusion, I join other scholars in arguing that the mature Wollstonecraft reclaims sentimental fiction as a radical pedagogy capable of transforming feeling into political knowledge. My intervention, however, emphasizes that one of the chief wrongs of women, according to the late Wollstonecraft, is rape. For Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman is populated with testimonies of harm and violation from women who legally ‘consented’ to sex, from upper-class married women to lower-class sex workers. I argue that the novel develops a definition of rape grounded in women’s embodied experience—their pain and subjective sense of violation that can only ever be known via narration—and stages society’s suspicion of that experience to reveal the limits of a legal system that uncritically embraces Enlightenment rationalism. 

The third chapter considers Mary Shelley’s Mathilda (1819), which explores the psychological harm inflicted by the heroine’s father’s incestuous desire. Scholarship often frames Mathilda either as a victim of patriarchal sexual abuse or as an unreliable narrator complicit in her own harm. I situate this either/or logic in a tradition of adjudicative criticism, and I argue that Mathilda operates as a case study for the concept of a desiring victim, a paradigm which recognizes that a rape victim can be both a desiring sexual subject and a victim of harm at the same time. Because the key instance of sexual violation in the novel is an instance of testimony—her father’s declaration of incestuous love—I argue that the novel organically develops a capacious understanding of rape that goes beyond physical harm and ultimately critiques sentimental testimony as form capable of inflicting harm. The novel thus explores the limits of sympathetic witness as a way to ameliorate suffering. 

The forthcoming final chapter will examine The History of Mary Prince (1831), the first published narrative account of the life experience of a formerly enslaved woman. This chapter will focus on rape in the context of slavery, and the Victorian era’s emerging fetishization of the harmed body and the evidentiary facticity of sexual harm. This research fellowship would provide valuable relief from administrative and teaching responsibilities, enabling me to draft this chapter in summer 2026. Two of the four chapters are already complete, and I plan to finish by the third by the end of this academic year. With fellowship support, I will be positioned to finalize chapter four and complete the introduction in fall 2026, allowing me to defend my dissertation on schedule in early spring 2027. 

Works Cited 

Dickie, Simon. “Rape Jokes and the Law.” Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. University of Chicago Press, 2011. 

Ferguson, Frances. “Rape and the Rise of the Novel.” Representations, vol. 20, 1987, pp. 88–112. 

Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s. University of Chicago Press, 1995. 

--Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. University of Chicago Press, 1988. 

MacKinnon, Catherine. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Harvard University Press, 1987. 

--Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws. Harvard University Press, 2005. 

--“Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence." 

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 8, no. 4, 1983, pp. 635–658. 

Halley, Janet. “The Move to Affirmative Consent.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 42, no. 1, 2016, pp. 257–290. 

Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford University Press, 1988. 

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. University of Chicago Press, 1984. 

Spampinato, Erin. “Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon: Adjudicative Criticism and the Capacious Conception of Rape.” Differences, vol. 32, no. 2, 2021, pp. 122–160. 

Sussman, Charlotte, and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson. Recognizing the Romantic Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 

Ty, Eleanor. Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s. University of Toronto Press, 1993. 

British Women Writers Conference (BWWC), 2025

"'A Sacred Horror... Unfit for Utterance:' Rape, Testimony, and Silence in Mary Shelley's Mathilda"

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), 2023 

"Historicizing Clarissa's 'The Mad Papers':  Towards a Trauma-Informed Theory of the Novel"

Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Conference, 2021

"John Clare, Habitat, and Edmund Burke"