Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- fiction -- families -- historical debates -- a changing society -- 1 The great disinheritance -- women separated from their kin -- women's property rights -- the value of women's work -- clarissa -- 2 Fathers and daughters -- the virgin wife -- writing daughters -- father-daughter separation -- sharing her father's power -- sentimental reunions -- dangerous intimacies -- 3 Sister-right and the bonds of consanguinity -- the same blood -- the sister tie -- conjugal ties and sibling ties -- a sister's portion -- kin corporations, state formation, and capitalism -- sisters and wives -- 4 Brotherly love in life and literature -- the good brother -- the sister's portion -- seventeenth-century siblings -- eighteenth-century siblings -- a sister's service -- brother trouble -- the fieldings and the reynoldses -- the elstobs -- a brother's protection -- 5 Privatized marriage and property relations -- the discourse of wives' subservience -- public marriage -- privatized marriage -- accumulation (rather than distribution) of family resources -- love-in-marriage -- liability -- children and their mothers -- the changing meaning of marriage -- 6 Sexualized marriage and property in the person -- the public discourse about sex -- sex and property -- controlling women's sexuality -- the invention of sexual disgust -- sex before marriage -- good girls and fallen women -- real-life magdalens -- wives and prostitutes -- women's sexuality and capitalism -- 7 Farming fiction: Arthur Young and the problem of representation -- man's place in the natural world -- the reality of small-scale farming -- the literary arthur young -- the idealized small farmer trope -- farming heroes and farming villains in children's books -- enlightenment agriculture.

fact and fiction -- wages, land, and marriage -- effects on the rural poor -- 8 The importance of aunts -- sentimentalized motherhood -- legal erasure of maternity -- mother substitutes -- fictional "aunts" in novels by frances burney and charlotte smith -- variations on a theme -- real aunts -- the pervasiveness of "aunts" -- the meaning of fictional aunts -- 9 Family feeling -- the incestuous family -- incest in the eighteenth century -- incest in fiction -- incest as the meaning of the gothic -- history in the gothic -- genre-licensed sexual expression -- blood will out -- the triumph of consanguinity -- afterword -- Bibliography -- PRIMARY SOURCES -- SELECTED SECONDARY SOURCES -- Index.