Courting Disaster

Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel

Zoë McGee

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781526188854
• eBook ISBN: 9781526188847
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think.

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society's mind about rape culture – and to reassure survivors they were not alone.

Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.

In an era that's clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway…

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: CONSENT
• PART II: INNOCENCE
• PART III: VIOLENCE
• PART IV: MARRIAGE
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography