Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel

By Zoë McGee

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think.

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zo McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society's mind about rape culture - and to reassure survivors they were not alone.

Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.

In an era that's clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1526188856
• ISBN13: 9781526188854
• Release Date: November 2025
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"