Matriarchs, Murderesses, and Coquettes: Investigations in Long-Eighteenth-Century Femininities

This article reviews three monographs related to feminist studies and literature of the long eighteenth century. The first study is Elizabeth Kraft's Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers, which argues for finding a predecessor to the sexual desiring female voice in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literature in the rhetoric of the matriarchs in the Hebrew bible. The second, Kirsten Saxton's Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680-1760: Deadly Plots explores long-eighteenth century femininity through the plots of fictional and factual murderesses, and investigates the ways in which female violence and femininity are articulated through criminality, gender, and fiction. The final monograph, Theresa Braunschneider's Our Coquettes: Capacious Desire in the Eighteenth Century uses the figure of the coquette as a filter through which to explore eighteenth-century femininity and culture, arguing that the figure of the coquette codifies and describes anxieties about female virtue and cultural anxieties such as patrilineal family structures and imperialism.