Elizabeth Kraft radically alters our conventional views of early women novelists by taking seriously their representations of female desire. Reading fiction by Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald in light of ethical paradigms drawn from biblical texts about women and desire, Kraft demonstrates not only the centrality of female desire in eighteenth-century culture and literature but its ethical importance as well.

Elizabeth Kraft is Professor of English at the University of Georgia, USA.

Contents: Introduction: in the voice of a woman; Matriarchal desire and ethical relation; Men and women in the garden of delight; Sexual awakening and political power; Hieroglyphics of desire; His sister's song; The forgotten woman; The Lot motif and the redaction of double desire; Conclusion: the last word; Works cited; Index.