Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body

Examining novels by authors such as Haywood, Smollett, and Inchbald, and uncovering new manuscript and print case records, Cheryl Nixon compares tales of fictional orphans to narratives of legal orphans. Focusing on the eighteenth-century construction of the "valued" orphan, her book shows this figure's centrality to the development of new novelistic subgenres, new ideologies of the individual, and new understandings of property, family, and gender.