Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature

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.