Description
In the early eighteenth century, the household accountant was traditionally female. However, just as women were seen as financial accountants, they were also deeply associated with the literary and narrative accounting inherent in letters and diaries. This book examines these socio-linguistic acts of feminized accounting alongside property, originality, and the development of the early novel. The book begins with an investigation of the reconceptualization of value that occurred between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While women were denied inheritance of land their fortune was increasingly realized in moveable wealth: textiles, furniture, valuables and money. The author shows how numbers, and in particular, number in financial accounts were used to record experience and create subjectivity, highlighting the role of almanac-diaries in providing a way in which the female owner-author could document her experienced sociability, thrift, prudence and control. Two female-narrated novels-Aphra Behn’s “Fair Jilt” and Daniel Defoe’s “Moll Flanders”-are then examined, questioning the way in which the century’s preoccupation with accounting manifested itself differently in novels of the time. The book concludes with an examination of the developing relationship between property, narrative, and ‘personality’. The picaresque an older form of narrative which charts the search for real property or land is contrasted with the ‘novel of personality’, which charts the search for personal property or land. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of History, Economic History, Women’s Studies and those interested in the early novel.
