Sophie Gee

She has many thoughts of escape from what she imagines must be surely her tyrannical and overbearing parents.

They're not, but it's a very playful pre-version of Northanger Abbey.

And Lennox follows it up with another novel called Henrietta,

which really does feature a woman who is fleeing from an abusive marriage.

And it's in the middle of the century that we start getting these big escape stories, women coming up with ways, imaginatively and creatively, to think about how the vast majority of women who are trapped in marriages that they haven't chosen, that have often been sort of thrust upon them by families, by families who want to hold on to wealth and power and property,

how women who really have no agency and very little authority in their own marriages, how they can sort of fight back.

We then get to the end of the 18th century, the dawn of the Jane Austen era, and we get the shift into Gothic.

So Gothic novels, as we know from Northanger Abbey, are novels that imagine the supernatural, the mysterious, the ghostly, the spectral as being the story behind the story of what's really going on in a novel.

The first of them that sort of put Gothic novels on the map was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

But it was Anne Radcliffe who...

smashed through the glass ceiling and blew the roof off with a Sicilian romance, the romance of the forest, the mysteries of Rudolfo and the Italian, all of which revolve around the trials and tribulations of runaway women who are caught in abusive marriages and oppressive relationships.

And so this catalyzes a giant wave of

fabulous Gothic writing, which Austen both pays homage to and ridicules in Northanger Abbey.

So we're getting this surfacing of these very difficult topics of women's experience.

And this is the marketplace that Jane Austen steps into when she starts drafting her novels in the 1790s.

So, Jonty, start us out on our travels across the

We think six of the most extraordinary, joyful, talented female novelists of this of these years.

Who are we going to start with?

But we love the Burneys.

Delightful.