In this strikingly original treatment of the rise of the novel, Nancy Armstrong argues that the novels and nonfiction written by and for women in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England paved the way for the rise of the modern English middle class. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontës, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrote the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore desirable as well as influential.