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Zoë McGee, "Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel" (Manchester UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Zoe McGee about her book titled Carding Disaster Reading between the Lines of the Regency Novel published by Manchester University Press in 2025. Now, obviously, Regency novels, yes, we are talking about, for instance, Jane Austen are really famous. There's a lot of things buried in them, there's a lot of things that have been anal analysed about them. But as the subtitle suggests, there is a lot to find out by reading between the lines, both in terms of what it helps us understand about the world in which these writers were living and writing in, but also, as I think our discussion is going to show, kind of where we're still at now. Obviously, many things have changed since the Regency period, but not everything has. So the reading between the lines has a sort of historical element as well as a kind of current one too. So lots for us to discuss. Zoe, thank you so much for joining me.
- [02:10]
C
No, thank you so much for having me.
- [02:12]
B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:17]
C
Yeah. So Courting Disaster grew out of almost like a feeling. When I was at university, I was at university. And like many people, my, my experience and my friend's experience was really colored by the fact that there was quite a lot of sexual assault going on on campus. Like, this is true of most campus universities in certainly in the uk, but. And I was kind of seeing this happening, like all around me to these really wonderful people, but also seeing a lot of kind of discourse in the newspapers and things like that about how millennials are too sensitive. Like, there was a lot of. There was a lot in the press at that point about, like workplace har. And about how people were just sort of overreacting. And at the same time there was like a sort of student led movement towards having more consent workshops at universities. And, you know, with that and with those sort of steps forward, were people being very, very upset that they had been invited to go to a consent workshop because didn't everybody know that they weren't a rapist? And so I was kind of in the. In the middle of all of this happening. I was sort of laughing with my friends about these people kind of going, oh, how dare you invite me to this thing? And it just, it really, really strongly reminded me of Mr. Collins from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, particularly at his proposal scene to Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, where he tells her, like, he tells her that she should marry him or that she's going to marry him. And she tells him she's flatly uninterested. And he proceeds to explain to her how she doesn't mean that and what she must mean and why, like what she's doing actually, just to say yes in a different way. And I'd always loved Jane Austen's books. So then I was like, well, I wonder, is that just that scene or is that something that's in her other novels that feels very similar to a lot of conversations we're having about no means. Yes. And a lot of these sort of rapists, like what is actually going on in those novels. And that kind of started me down this track of looking into Austen's books, but also books from the other, from the 18th century, female authors seeing what they were doing, what was actually happening at the time, and just kind of building up this picture that actually a lot of these writers, although they had quite different political views, all seemed to agree quite strongly on the importance of consent. So that's where the book was kind of born from.
- [04:54]
B
Yeah, I think so often interesting books come from a combination of kind of academic research interests and then also things that one's encountering as one just kind of lives in the world. And often the intersection of those things leads to really interesting research. And clearly your book is very much kind of coming out of that combination. So I wonder if we can start to talk about some of those things you figured out once you started asking those questions about, like, hang on, what is showing up in the novels. So let's start, I think, with Clarissa and Mansfield park, because I think when we're talking about issues of consent, we're often also talking about ideas of victim and kind of who gets to raise questions about kind of consent or lack thereof. So if we're looking at these novels, what points are being made here about who can and cannot be a victim and with what sort of impact.
- [05:44]
C
So Clarissa's a really interesting one. This is often like, often if you find a sort of a monograph or a book talking about consent and the 18th century novel, it will talk about Clarissa. You kind of have to talk about about it. And Samuel Richardson, the author, does a really interesting thing with Clarissa because in the book, Clarissa is raped, but Clarissa is raped while she is drugged, unconscious. She is unable to resist in a way that the 18th century legal system would have recognized as appropriate resistance. So for a crime to be kind of recognized as rape, the victim had to resist with all of their strength. Now she's unconscious, so she's not doing anything. Very clearly, you know, to, to us today, but also to Richardson's readers, like, this is not someone who is consenting to this encounter. But we can also see that she's not managed to kind of follow the guidelines that the law sets out. So he's really highlighting the flaw in this requirement of the law. So you see that actually like a victim can be a victim without having been able to resist as well. The other thing that he does is that Clarissa, she's very close to perfect in a lot of ways. Like, she's a very beautiful, very moral, very well behaved young woman who happens to have a terrible family. And she's broadly very obedient to them. But when it comes to who she's going to marry, it starts to get a bit more complicated and the family become convinced that she's disobeying them and that this disobedience is a sign of ingratitude and kind of makes her a terrible person. And he's sort of highlighting again how, you know, you're not on the side of the family when you're reading this. So you're seeing that Clarissa is, you know, she is very moral. She is a very kind of traditional Heroine in a lot of ways. But there comes a point when she, for various reasons, ends up making a kind of midnight meeting in the garden with this character Lovelace, who is this sort of rake figure. And she really isn't supposed to have midnight meetings in gardens unchaperoned with men. Now she does it. You can kind of follow her reasoning through why she's doing it. But in the end, Lovelace basically sets this trap for her where he ends up running her into his carriage and she's kind of crying out, oh, no, no, no, no, don't. Don't do that. But Richardson has sort of has this. This letter where he talks about his intentions with Clarissa and was sort of saying, like, he wanted her to be imperfect, but not through her intention. So she never means to do the wrong thing, but sometimes she does act kind of in quotes incorrectly, so she's not a perfect model of feminine behavior. And I think what he's doing here is sort of toe in the water of the fact that actually the idea that someone is a perfect victim is a really problematic sort of rape myth that says if you start unpicking what a person needs to do in order to count as a victim, that can be quite problematic because the thing that they need to sort of do is be attacked. And whatever they were kind of doing before, that doesn't impact the fact that they were attacked. So he's got Clarissa kind of taking some of these slightly questionable actions that people can point to and say, well, she shouldn't have gone into the garden with Lovelace. And Richardson is saying, but here is this character, yes, sure, she's done this, she's gone into the garden, but it's not her fault that she's then locked up and traumatised and attacked. And so he's showing with both the unconsciousness and with this imperfect behaviour that there are kind of flaws with the way that the kind of victimization was being conceived. So I think that is what, to me is really fascinating about Clarissa and the fact that he. People got too attached to Lovelace because he was this very dashing sort of bad boy character. And Richardson was kind of. They wanted him to rewrite the book, have them end up together, have Lovelace reform and become more moral. And Richardson kind of keeps going back and adding to this book and editing it and being, like, adding footnotes to tell you why Lovelace is really, really bad. And actually not rehabilitating that assailant character and saying, actually, you don't want your heroine to end up with him. He's awful. So I also think that's quite interesting that he's really keen to make sure people understand just how problematic this rapist character is, even though he's also quite witty and charming and, you know, is someone who people really did connect with. Mansfield Park. So Mansfield Park I love as a novel, and it's one that of Austen's books, it's often, like, described as her least popular novel. And I think part of this is because Fanny Price, the heroine, is not like a kind of Elizabeth Bennet type. She's not spunky, witty, outgoing. She's not a kind of strong female character in that model. She's very shy, she's very quiet, and she is the victim of domestic abuse. And I think that's something that can feel quite strange to say, because I think we don't often think about Austen's novels as containing something as extreme as domestic abuse. But she's grown up. She's a poor relation who's grown up in this big house with her family. Not her by. Not her parents, but her aunt, uncle, her cousins, and they all spend, like, her entire life. She's there. She knows she's there on a kind of sufferance. She knows she's there as the poor relation. She can be sent away at any point, and none of them really like her that much, and none of them are nice to her. So if she is very. She's scared of them, and they just kind of squash her perpetually. And you see throughout this book, like, the effect of this, that now she's an adult, when she's older, she's grown up being kind of conditioned to respond to mistreatment and to believe that that is all she's entitled to. There's all sorts of moments, these lovely moments when Austin is sort of talking about how she would rather, you know, she's kind of swallowing her words or she's being silenced or she's being forced to speak when she doesn't want to. She's never doing what she actually wants to be doing. And I think, you know, she's also someone who. She does want to be quiet. She does want to be kind of gentler than a lot of her cousins, who are very boisterous, very outgoing, but she's also grown up quite malnourished. She's grown up without the same kind of health and care that her cousins have. And she is kind of described like a disabled character. She's not able to walk for as long as she has to sit and rest. She's described as being extremely small. And you kind of see that maybe there is a physiological element to this, too. But I think because she's in a big house and because she's in an Austen novel, we don't always see her as a victim in the same way. Now, she doesn't suffer a physical assault in the books, but as I say, there is this kind of. This domestic abuse where she is kind of tyrannized by her uncle and by her aunts and her cousins. The one cousin who is slightly more nice to her is the cousin she falls in love with. And I do think there is a little bit of grooming that's kind of. Not necessarily deliberately, but that's gone on here where he kind of. She turns herself into his ideal woman because he is the only person who offers her affection. So I think you kind of see a sense in Mansfield park where, like Clarissa, here's a character who in many ways fits with the period's ideas of morality and what it means to be good. You know, she tries her best to be really obedient. She's very grateful for everything. She's polite, she's quiet. She kind of does all the right things in a way, but she's. And she's. You know, she's living. She's got lovely clothes. She lives in a big house. She's not. She's not badly off, and she's not in a. An innately dangerous position, but she feels incredibly unsafe and on her own. And I think you kind of see possibly a more common, like just the kind of everyday side. It's much harder to point to a kind of everyday domestic situation is problematic than it is a specific act of violence or being imprisoned. But in a way, she is imprisoned. It's just that it's got a lot more lace on it.
- [14:54]
B
And so this is also complicating ideas, then, of who gets to be a victim?
- [14:58]
C
Yes, I think so, because I think we don't necessarily see victims when we look at these grand houses or these sort of novels that seem like. I think people cast, for example, Austen's books as love stories. For me, Mansfield park isn't a love story at all. It's a sort of series of failed love stories. But I think we don't look at Fanny as a victim necessarily, because she's in novels by this author. She's in this sort of quite rarefied position, finance. You know, she's in a. Because she's in quite a soft domestic setting. I think we don't necessarily see her as a victim, because there isn't an overt attack that's happening. But actually, if you look at what people are saying to her, how she's being treated, the vulnerability that she has, the precariousness of her situation, how dependent she is on the favor and opinion of these people and how quickly their opinion on her switches when she does anything that kind of goes against what they want her to do. As soon as she kind of has her own opinion or says something that goes against what they want her to be saying, they're telling her she's incredibly ungrateful. They throw her out of the house, only for a bit, but they sent her away to try and teach her not to be so difficult. And this is like the least difficult person. She is bending over backwards to try and accommodate everyone, whether they deserve it or not, and she ends up marrying the person that she wants to marry. It doesn't necessarily look like a story where she is a victim, but actually, if you pay attention to the story as it's happening and her emotions around it, and her capacity to actually say no or to consent to the situation she finds herself in, she is a victim.
- [16:58]
B
Yeah, no, those are both definitely ones that kind of sort of show that there is more nuance and gray area into the idea of a victim than society kind of might otherwise want to think. And I think the idea kind of of control or lack thereof is a really key part of this in terms of, obviously, moments of violence. But I think the Mansfield park argument around kind of the example you gave of speaking when she doesn't want to or not speaking when she does want to, like, that's also an issue of control, and that comes up in some other novels that you analyse too. So if we move, for example, to Cecilia, we have questions around financial decision making and judgments. And can you tell us about how those are also related to these questions of sexual consent?
- [17:40]
C
Financial control is an incredibly huge. Is incredibly tied up with sexual consent, because throughout history, financial control often determines freedom to leave a particular situation. So if you have independent financial means, you can live without another person, you are able to leave. If the person you are with is dangerous, you are able, or the situation becomes problematic. If you are not able to leave, you, by kind of definition, you have to stay. And so if someone is kept from being able to leave, they don't have a choice about whether they stay. So in my book, I talk about Clarissa, I talk about Cecelia. Sorry, they all have very similar names. But I talk about Cecilia because she is an heiress. And so she is, you know, she's got an estate and she's got a fortune too, and it's hers personally. So unlike many other women in these novels, she does have a personal fortune, but she doesn't have access to it yet because she's still underage. And so the control of her finances is with her guardians, who are supposed to protect her and look after her and don't do a great job of that. And what you see is this woman who is in theory independent financially, being denied access to her money, which in turn means that she's unable to make all sorts of choices ranging from to buy some books, she's not able to pay for those because no one will give her access to her own money so that she can pay for the thing that she's decided she wants to buy, but up to where she's able to live. She lives with one of her guardians and it becomes not a safe place for her to live. But she's then not able to live somewhere else because she either has to live specifically with a guardian or she's kind of stuck until she's an adult because she doesn't have access to this finance, so she can't just go and stay somewhere else. What it means for her, she's going to come into this money. So a lot of people are hunting for it. And if she didn't have it, if she's like a kind of. If she was a poorer heroine, like, like many of our heroines can be financial, the finances that she needs could guarant, could be that if she doesn't have money, she's then going to struggle to live. So basically we talk about financial control in relation to sexual consent because it's that capacity for. It's that freedom to leave. But it's also. So within the 18th century, when you got married, you signed over consent to the person you were married to, so your wife would become the husband's kind of legal property, effectively on marriage. She would not be able to. You couldn't legally commit rape against your wife up until, I think the 1992 in the UK, it was very recent that marital rape became criminalised. And what that means is that we recognize that marriage has always been an economic proposition, has always involved people kind of merging finances, estates, things like that. But part of the thing that is being signed over is sexual access to this woman. And she is expected to, in a lot of, particularly in a lot of these more noble marriages, that there's an expectation that she's going to have children. So there is an active expectation that they're going to have sex. If you are being traded for your money, you're also being traded for sex in. In a kind of very odd way that Cecilia is a really interesting novel to look at, because Cecilia kind of doesn't ever have access to her own money, but represents all of this fortune and is kind of being bartered and negotiated by a whole host of these male characters to kind of see who's going to own her and everything that that entails. And so when the novel itself is talking about her money, it's also talking about her sexuality, her person, her body. She is part of this fortune that's being traded. And so you get this doublespeak almost, where, yes, they're technically having conversations about access to her money, but that's not all they're talking about. There's a kind of a secondary layer that's happening underneath. We're not in a time period where we have quite so many estates and we're more on the side of companion at marriage, where, you know, we marry for love. But we do all still have to take into account the kind of financial realities of things. So I think there have been newspaper articles and things more recently about with the rising rental costs, a lot of couples are staying together longer now because you aren't able necessarily to afford a place on your own. You know, there's a topic, it's called running away money, when it usually pops up on Twitter or on TikTok or kind of any of those platforms where people advocate for, particularly if you're female, but absolutely not a specifically gendered requirement, having kind of a separate pot of money from your partner so that if they have control of the finances, you are still able to leave if the situation becomes problematic, even if you don't think it's going to become problematic because it's just giving you a choice about staying. I think for me, one of the big things that consent boils down to is choice and is capacity to. And freedom to make those choices. And money is very much something that enables that, because if you don't have access to it, you can't leave. You can't make a different decision should you need to.
- [23:57]
D
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- [24:24]
C
Experian.
- [24:26]
B
Yeah, that definitely is a link between now and then. Even if the kind of specific legal aspects aren't quite the same, a lot of the sort of concepts remain quite relevant, as does the idea of reading consent through behaviour. I mean, I think this really goes back to what you were saying in terms of what is and was happening on university campuses, in terms of yes means yes versus no. And all those sorts of conversations that turns out does show up though, if we go back to this Regency period as well. Even if perhaps people would be surprised to see that given how far back in time it was. For example, in the novel Camilla, can we see that?
- [25:04]
C
Yes, Camilla is a wonderful, wonderful example of miscommunication. Trope is about 800 pages of miscommunication and it does a really good job of highlighting the way that we read people's behavior with bias. So Camilla and I'm going to get his name on Camilla and Edgar. Edgar Mandelbert, I think, is his name. They both love each other and they are ultimately. They ultimately end up together because it's this sort of novel, but along the way they go through a very significant period of misunderstanding each other. So Camilla falls in love with Edgar before she's supposed to, because as a woman in the 18th century, the proper thing for her to do is to wait until he tells her he likes her and then she should suddenly have feelings. But she has these feelings ahead of time and kind of knows this and is potentially a bit embarrassed about it because she knows she's not really supposed to, but they sort of have this unfortunate scenario where they both like each other. But Edgar is very wealthy and seeks advice from his mentor. And his mentor has had a bad experience with a relationship in the past and therefore gives him terrible advice. And so his mentor says, you need to check that she's not just interested in your money, you need to test her behaviour. This is so much more prevalent today than we might think it is. There's all sorts of advice about how to test your date to check their intentions towards you and your finances. It baffles me that we are still kind of here. But he tells Edgar to start to act like he's not interested in her and see what she's doing and see how moral she is and how pure she is and how well she reacts. And they just. You get this wonderful thing from jumping between their two heads. So you're seeing exactly, like, what they think is happening, why they then do what they do and how they're expecting the other person to read it. And then you jump over to the other person's point of view and you see, no, they absolutely don't. So there's an example where Edgar tells Camilla that they are. He's not in love with her, they're not going to be together, and she's really, really upset. But she knows that despair is not. Is like a really is. You really don't want to despair. It's seen as, like, immoral because it's sort of. She's trying to show that she is accepting his rejection of her. She's respectful of it, she's moving forwards. So she tries not to mope. And he times this sort of rejection of her right before they get on a boat trip together with a few other people. So she's stuck on a boat trying to act like she's not despairing because she's trying to show him that she respects him as a person and she's listened to him and she's heard it, but she's not despairing and overdoing it and kind of. She's not depressed about it because that would also be kind of against God's will. So she is therefore chatty and upbeat. And Edgar is very confused why she doesn't seem to be upset about the fact that he said no to her. And she decides, right, the best thing for me to do is to talk to this older man because he's too old to be, like, a potential suitor. So I'm gonna look like. I'm not trying to kind of matchmaker. I'm not flirting with anyone. I'm just having a nice conversation with this older gentleman. The older gentleman doesn't think he's too old to be a suitor. So he's then like, oh, look, this young girl's paying me attention. She must be interested in me. All these other men have very young wives. Why don't I have one too? And so he then kind of propositions her and she tells him no because she's not interested, but she tells him no. And Edgar walks past them and it's this kind of beautiful moment where Camilla sees him walk past and is. And is rejecting this wealthy older man. And she's delighted because she's like, look, look. Now he will see that I'm not just interested in money because If I was, I would obviously marry this wealthy man. However old he was, he can see that it was because I loved him, that I was interested in him. And, you know, this is going to prove just how disinterested in money I am. And Edgar walks past and he's like, what? She's been flirting with this old man all night and now he's proposed and she's not even taking him. Was she just trying to lead him on? Was she just being a tease? Like, this is a completely different person to the person I thought she was. How awful. And they kind of. They go through this continual dance of miscommunication throughout the novel because they're both operating from a position where they think they know what's happening and they then read things to meet that expectation. One of the things I talk about in Courting Disaster is some more recent kind of psychological studies that were. And sociological studies that were done where they kind of put people in sort of bar settings and monitored how they read rejections and indirect rejections and found that if they wanted to kind of pick someone up, they were more likely to treat a rejection as a maybe or as a. To read it as like a. You see, what you want to see was the kind of layman's version of this finding. And I think you see that quite clearly in something like Camilla. And you also see throughout a lot of these novels the way that the kind of gendered requirements of behavior for women often signal consent, regardless of intention like that. Often there are ways of reading every interaction as consenting, and most of the time the proper feminine response doesn't involve a rejection. And so finding ways to reject but be appropriately feminine is quite challenging and can be kind of ignored by these people who then just want to see it all as a particular type of response.
- [31:35]
B
And as you mentioned, there's research showing that some of that is still very much in effect now. So interesting to think about kind of what is and isn't allowed to. You know, going back to what we were saying earlier about Mansfield park, in a way. So let's add some more novels to this to see kind of what other layers and nuances we can draw out. So, for instance, the novel Ophelia, what sort of cleverness is happening here in terms of arguments about consent?
- [32:00]
C
Oh, so this is very fun. Ophelia is like. Is a very silly novel in a lot of ways. It's. That's almost farcical in terms of the characterisation, because our main character, Ophelia, is impossibly naive, according to the story. She's grown up in rural Wales with her aunt, and her aunt is the only person she's ever seen until she's like, 18. And the two of them just read moral philosophy and run a farm somehow. Yeah, I think there's very minimal manual labor going on on this farm. But she. She knows everything about what is moral and nothing about vice. So her aunt has kind of taught her all these principles, but she has no knowledge at all about anything sort of lustful, about anything violent. She doesn't really get the dangers of the world because she's not been exposed to them and she's not thought about them. So she is this. This kind of pure being. And because she is this impossibly naive person, she doesn't recognize the danger she's in throughout the novel. So you get this lovely example where lovely is maybe the wrong word. But a man appears on the farm and the aunt is suspicious of him, and Ophelia doesn't understand why because he's just a stranger. Like, why would you be suspicious? What could he possibly do? And the aunt kind of sends him packing and he pops back in the middle of the night and abducts Ophelia and rides off with her over his horse. And she's telling you this story from the future. So she's now grown up and she's recounting the tales of her youth to somebody. And so you get this lovely double perspective where storyteller Ophelia knows exactly what was happening, has the worldly experience to know what the dangers were, why this man was doing that, why all these things are happening. But in story, Ophelia has no clue. And so she's able to relate the events to us in a way that both shows us what she doesn't know and implies what that is. So when she's carried off on the horse, she's saying, well, I didn't understand what the danger was. I knew that I didn't have any enemies, so no one would want revenge on me. I didn't have any money, so this really wasn't going to be a burglary. So I had absolutely no idea what I should be afraid of, but I was afraid. And so she's showing us that her character was moral enough to have the correct reaction of being afraid, but doesn't have the knowledge to apprehend a sexual threat. But you are fully able as a reader to go, I wonder why he's carried her off. And also, this is like, the only thing left on the list. So she's cleared up for us that it's definitely not going to be a random revenge plot that's crept in here. So you get this because of the way the storytelling is structured. You do get this extra perspective of more knowledgeable Ophelia kind of helping show you what she didn't know. And by telling you what she didn't know, you kind of can see what it is that is happening. But it also means that you find you have her. She's impossible. Like, there is no real person who could be like that. And it means that we are encouraged not to critique her actions in the same way. So I feel like when there is a case of sexual violence, what we tend to do is interrogate the victim's behavior. And I think we often do this over and above interrogating. Interrogating the perpetrator. I think we often say, well, you know, what was she wearing? Where was she walking? How did she contribute to making this person think that this was acceptable? A lot of that is intensely problematic. We kind of. We take the idea that you are innocent until proven guilty, and we apply it to the perpetrator, and we say they're innocent until we can prove that they're guilty. But they then assume that the victim must be guilty in order to do that. And then we don't kind of apply it back to the victim and give them the benefit of the doubt. So often the victim is questioned as a guilty person, which is one of the real sort of problematic areas of the way we talk about. About sexual violence is. But we can see that Ophelia, she's unrealistically naive and impossibly so. So there's nothing left to interrogate as to her intentions. But we can still see how her actions make people around her think that she knows what's happening and is contributing to it. So once she's been carried off on this horse, our male character sets her up. As in town, he's planning to make her his mistress. He doesn't believe in marriage, he doesn't want to marry her, but he kind of sets her up to look like a kept woman. And he keeps her away from anyone who might fill her in on it. And everyone sees her living in this house, spending time with him, being unchaperoned, doing all the behaviors that tell them they are in a relationship together. And they believe that she's fully cognizant of this, willing, happy to be there. And she kind of is because he's told her that he's being her guardian. So she doesn't understand what it's being made to look like and what implications are being given. And so you kind of see that we're not asking. We can see that her behavior is making people, is adding to a particular impression, but we also know that it's not coming from her. It's not her fault. She's not aware of this. And so one of the things that Sarah Fielding, the author, is really kind of highlighting is that if you are too ignorant, if you're too innocent, too ignorant of the types of dangers and the threats that you encounter, you can take behaviors that make it look like you're consenting or on board with them or interested in them because you don't know what the subtext is. You don't know what you're actually saying yes to. You don't know what you should be doing to highlight disinterest. You need to have a certain amount of knowledge to be safe from these things. And so she's kind of targeting this idea that you must be in a different way to Clarissa, but targeting this idea that you must be totally innocent to be a victim and also to be a good person. She's saying it's unsafe to keep women completely ignorant of the risks that they face. And actually, you need to know what people are like. And one of the kind of big, big threads that runs underneath Ophelia is this idea that the people that you think you should be most able to trust, you can't necessarily trust, like, people in positions of authority over you are not necessarily safe. And the book is kind of doing. It's kind of giving you that message and telling you that. But it's also through the story, but it's also telling you that as a reader and kind of encouraging readers to potentially then reflect on their own situations. And they're not going to be as naive as Ophelia. But it kind of opens up then, oh, actually, maybe I should reflect on my life and the people in it and do they all have good intentions towards me? And are they someone I should be able to trust?
- [39:38]
B
Yeah, I think that is a thread that comes through in Ophelia and also in a number of other novels. This kind of idea of, like, the novel in some ways teaching readers to kind of assess men and their intentions or sort of almost more aimed at, like, bystanders, like, you know, when you see something going on, what might you want to pay attention to? Are there any sort of other instances of this in any other novels we haven't discussed yet that we want to mention in terms of these sort of education, reflective aspects.
- [40:08]
C
So there's quite a few of them. But I think the ones I talk about in Courting Disaster would really be something like the Victim of Prejudice by Mary Hayes and also Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft. And these two novels are, they're very odd novels. They're actually quite bad novels in terms of a story point of view. They're much more focused on being kind of polemic pieces of writing and political writings. But I think it's one of these things where like a lot of, I'll be honest, a lot of these novels are talking to bystanders. I think like there's Adelaide Mowbray is another one which I don't kind of get time to talk about in, in the book. But they are, they're not trying to teach men not to, not to rape because I feel like they're, they're not that. I don't think there's any kind of illusion that someone's going to necessarily read this book and go, oh, actually I, I did think it would be awfully fun to attack this person and now I realize it's bad and I've changed my mind. I think that's. They're not trying to do that. And they're also very importantly not trying to tell you how not to be raped because they're quite clear on the fact that it's not the fault of the victim, which is more radical than it should be. But I think they're very clear that actually it's not them that's making it happen, it's the attacker who's choosing to do this. What they're trying to, what they kind of get at with the bystanders is that a lot of the time when someone is harmed, the repercussions echo socially in a way that is almost always more damaging and more problematic for the victim than it is for the attacker. And I think, you know, your positioned to see how difficult these women's lives and their rehabilitation back into society is made by the reactions of the people around them and to dislike that and to be annoyed at this sort of social group for not understanding how it wasn't their fault and for making their life so much harder. And I think it's encouraging you in that way to not be that person which feels like a much more achievable goal in a way than trying to talk someone down from being an attacker. Because it's this sort of passivity and the kind of cowardice almost of going along with the social Norm. So the Victim of Prejudice is one of the rare books from this period that does have a physical rape in it. A lot of these courtship novels don't have like a full physical attack in them or on the page, whereas Victim of Prejudice does. And after it's happened, our heroine suffers extensively. So she goes from being a very articulate person who is quite vocal and clear about her rights to this man who is a sort of member of the aristocracy. And she's very kind of sharp with him and telling him, actually, you're not allowed to do this, or I have these rights. After the attack, she exhibits a lot of the same symptoms that we associate with ptsd in that she can't speak when she sees him. She starts shaking, she kind of freezes. She has lots of these sort of dissociative episodes and nightmares. And you really kind of get a sense of the mental trauma that is created by these sort of acts of violence. But you also find that after. After this has happened, she tells him she's going to take him to court. He points out that, again, with the sort of element of financial control and sexual consent, he points out that he is too rich for her to be able to do any good in the court setting because the court's set up against her and he has enough money that he can just bury her case. And I think, you know, that you can also see this. This kind of flip side of money and consent, where the more money someone has, the more people will ignore what they do. So she's not able to take him to court, and she kind of goes and tries to make a living and she's not able to get work because she's got this reputation now. She can't kind of give good references. And because she's got this background, people then she's kind of at prey to the shopkeeper who employs her, then tries to make advances on her. And because she's not willing to put up with it, she has to leave. And then she's leaving without a reference. And then she's stuck in this cycle where she can't get safe work. She can only get work in places where they are happy to take someone who doesn't have this character reference, which are the same sort of places that are going to take advantage of that. And you see that she keeps moving from place to place and nobody's willing to help her without there being a kind of a sexual exchange. And she ultimately dies in prison or dies of in poverty, rather. You get this counterpoint to her mother. There's sort of an echo between her story and her mother's story and where she has made all what we would think of as like the more like morally correct choices. Her mother was in the same situation in the past and sort of went down the route of prostitution and sex work, but ends in the same way. And it's something that the novels both victim of prejudice and actually Mary Wollstonecraft's books sort of talk about the way that a lot of people in abusive, in sort of in these situations are pushed into them by the lack of recourse elsewhere. So her mother goes into sex work because there isn't really anything else she can do at that point, and something Mary Wollstonecraft talks about a lot in Maria, which is a different novel, but set up to think about the way that servants particularly were very vulnerable to this. As a servant, you were working in someone else's house and a lot of your wage came from, like, the clothes that you would wear and the place to stay and the food and the rest of it. But you're intensely vulnerable to the people who own the house and to the other servants and to the master of the house. And so she has this story of a girl, Jemima, who is sort of the master, kind of forces himself on her. And at that point she then can't do anything else. So once this has happened, she can't leave because he'll tell the mistress and she can't complain because the mistress will find out, they'll blame her, she'll be thrown out, she won't have a reference. She will then be stuck without any that many work options other than going down into the sort of sex work route. Or she stays, but she kind of has to keep fulfilling this role with the master. And in a way, what she's actually kind of, once she's been assaulted, she's kind of in this position where that is. Now, those are the two options for her, is she's going to be engaging in work for set in sex for money, but is it with this one person in this house or is it on the street with potentially more dangerous people? So she sort of stays, I say chooses to stay. It's not. She doesn't really feel like there's a huge choice in it and she's not really choosing whether she wants to have sex with them or not. She just is unable, she feels, to do anything about it. And once she kind of is thrown out, she then kind of goes in and finds herself in this more dangerous position. And what wollstonecraft is very explicitly saying here is that often people end up in those roles because of need and because of necessity, but they never seem to be men. And so Wollstonecraft is making a very explicit point in her novel about how there is almost a pipeline of cycling people into these vulnerable positions and kind of creating more people to fill those roles by abusing people to then make them need to take those roles. So she's sort of reckoning with these ideas that you shouldn't let people back into society if they've fallen and you shouldn't open them up to sin. And she's kind of saying if there were more options for people, they wouldn't be stuck in this particular situation. And, you know, they. She kind of makes this point that it never seemed, that you never seem to find, like, hordes of men also street walking. Now, there will have been obviously some, but it's. She's kind of talking about the way that actually so many women in this time period are exchanging sex for money, but whether. Whether because they want to or because they don't have that many other options or because it's going to be taken from them anyway and they might as well therefore have some kind of recompense from it.
- [49:41]
B
Yeah, I mean, it goes back to what you were saying earlier about choice and having it and kind of having it or having the appearance of it, but not necessarily. But in fact, the thread I'd love to kind of pull from that answer is you mentioned briefly sort of legal cases in the legal system, obviously, novels are one way of educating people about kind of how things work and how things should work.
- [50:00]
C
Work.
- [50:01]
B
How much was the legal system in this time also a place to have discussions around consent and sexual assault?
- [50:08]
C
It's interesting because I think a lot of what the novels do is talk about cases that wouldn't play well in court. I think we always, because of the speed. Courts always are a little bit behind the ideology of a time almost because it takes quite a long time to actually code new things into law. But so a lot of the time the courts are not brilliant places for discussing consent specifically, because consent is quite a hard thing to prove in a lot of ways. You don't often have witnesses. It often comes down to people's individual accounts, the kind of he said, she said scenario. And so the courts place a lot of focus on the degree of resistance of the victim to try and work out whether consent has been given or not. What I think was. What I found was really interesting looking at. I looked at this kind of 50 year window at the Old Bailey and the cases, there were very few cases being brought in the first place. Most of the people were from a sort of, I would say, like a serving class bracket. Like they often were servants or they worked in pubs or they kind of, they had enough income to bring a case to court, but not so much status that their marriage would be a more significant economic arrangement. And in those cases, it wouldn't really go through the courts. You either keep it quiet or you marry the person silently because that's the way you keep your reputation and your value as a tradable good. How horrible that is in the courtrooms. A lot of the cases that were brought and that were more successful at getting guilty verdicts were involved children who were under the age of consent. Because in those circumstances you don't have to prove consent, you have to just prove that the act has taken place. And so those were the cases that kind of were seen as having a better chance of getting that guilty verdict. Like, for some context on this, in that 50 year window, there were 24 guilty verdicts for rape. So slightly less than two a year on average. It really wasn't great odds at getting a conviction. Part of this, actually, one of the things I found really fascinating was that at this point time, rape was a capital crime. So you, in theory, if you were convicted of rape, you were sentenced to death. Now, that didn't necessarily actually happen, but it was something that people were very reluctant to convict people for. This idea of like, is this thing that has been done to you worth this man's life? And I think we see echoes of that today where sentencing often reflects like, oh, is this star athlete? Should we really derail his promising future just because he's made one little mistake? And it's kind of that narrative very much is still present. But the death penalty was removed in the later 1800s and at that point the conviction rate shot up. And I think there were by about 400% or something. So I have a little section where I kind of compare the rates for people bringing murder cases and murder conviction rates in the same time period. And then looking at after capital punishment goes away and seeing the difference in growth and when capital punishment is still in place, we have a huge number of people being convicted for murder, far, far, far more than are being convicted for rape. But you know, we wouldn't necessarily expect there to be that many more murderers in the city than rapists because, you know, our lived experience also tells us that we always know that rape is underreported, but they're just. It's, it's not. It's just not more common to kill people. And so, you know, the growth rate for murder does, you know, increase a little bit when this death penalty is removed, but it's nothing like the change that happens with rape. And I think you really see the impact that, that death penalty has, I think, not just on the willingness to sentence, but the willingness to bring to trial. Because the typical thing is that you are more likely to be attacked by someone known to you and you're in a small community, so it's, are you gonna be bringing a potential death pet sentence on a family member or your friend's husband or your employer, or like the person, you know, with two kids? It's not usually a random stranger. And so I think it was very interesting to see the impact that those sorts of external elements had on which cases were successful and how many cases were being brought and what people were really looking at. I think the main thing I saw people kind of trying to educate on in court was more to do with sort of sexual health. There was a kind of urban myth that if you had an sti, had venereal disease, you could cure it by having sex with an innocent person. And so obviously the most innocent person was seen as a child. And so you had a lot of these cases where people were sort of attempting to cure themselves. And so they give the judge kind of specifically, they give space to the medical witnesses to explain that this categorically is not something you should do, is not something that will cure you, is a terrible practice. And you kind of see them using the fact that these cases are going to be published in the newspapers to try and get that message across to people. There were a few cases that showed some of these consent ideas coming through, and those are ones I spend a bit more time on and looked at. And so that was interesting as well, to see how even within the courtrooms, which are going to be more conservative in those ways, because they're not going to have been. Those ideas aren't going to have made it into law yet if they're in public consciousness. It was interesting to see, for example, there was a case where there were women who were talking about trying to. They were being kind of taken around a lot of pubs that they didn't really want to go to, and they were saying, like, we wanted to go home. And the defence lawyers are saying, well, nobody was holding you down. And this doesn't really continue as a line of questioning. They're kind of able to say, like, we wanted to go, we were not able to go, but no, we weren't held down. And they kind of accept that they were maybe constrained by something other than physical force, and so showing that kind of compulsion and threat as a way of reducing consent without it being purely physical. So that you get elements like that coming in. And you also see the last thing I'll say was that which I talk a lot about, reading between the lines. And part of that is because the language of the 18th century is incredibly euphemistic. They really love to not say things. They really like to talk around things, to leave it in those gaps to like, you know, so we talked about Ophelia slightly earlier and saying, oh, well, I wasn't going. I wasn't going to be a revenge plot, and he didn't want to murder me, he didn't want to take my money, so what could he possibly want? And you kind of leave this gap for someone else to fill in because you. You know what that answer is. The courtroom is where you're supposed to be as explicit as possible. You need to say exactly what happened. You need to describe exactly like which bits of anatomy are where and exactly what is going on. And people are still very, very euphemistic. The language is very veiled. Obviously, it's incredibly difficult to stand in public and talk about this, particularly, you know, stand in public with the papers and with quite, you know, potentially unfriendly, loud, jeering crowd who are going to make jokes. And it's very exposing. And, you know, the other person, the person who's attacked you is probably also there. And it's. It's a whole ordeal. But it was interesting seeing that the language is still veiled and, you know, people are. Even when being like the. The most explicit people are being. Is not that explicit. So I think that was also quite useful to. To take as a perspective to looking at the books and think about the fact that they're not explicit doesn't mean they're not talking about it.
- [59:11]
B
Yeah. And of course, a lot of those things are still very relevant today around kind of what kind of language gets used and how explicit can it be, how explicit should it be? How explicit is it expected to be, are still very much live issues that kind of goes back to. Right. What we were talking about at the beginning, the links between these novels, despite how long ago they were and where we're at now. So lots to kind of continue to think about on that subject is that in fact what you're continuing to work on, or are you moving on to different things? Is there anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [59:44]
C
I mean, the book hasn't been out for very long. It only came out in November, so it's only been out a little bit. So we're still kind of sharing that and working on the paperback for that. I don't know. I'm still working on what I want to do next. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is to do with reader consent in romance books. My day job involves a lot of genre fiction and I'm just intrigued by the kind of characters, of the love interests and what personality types are being shown in the way that sometimes there is a kind of growth of a particular genre of romance where readers don't necessarily. Where they're sort of darker or there's less on page consent. But it's something that still feels consensual to read because the reader is kind of. That's what they've chosen to go for. They've looked for that trope and that's the sort of fantasy they want to explore. I think it's interesting to kind of see the difference between the ones where the reader is consenting in that situation versus when they don't like the love interest and would read it in a different way. So I'm kind of intrigued by exploring the ways we kind of are talking about violence versus kink, I guess.
- [61:10]
B
Yeah. I mean, again, lots to explore there. So clearly you will be keeping pretty busy and of course, helping get the word out about the book you've written that we've been talking about titled Courting Disaster, Reading between the Lines of the Regency Novel, published by Manchester University Press in 2025. Zoe, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [61:30]
C
Oh, thank you for having me. It's been really lovely to check.