The prose fiction of Penelope Aubin offers a delightful and provocative challenge to many of our standard ways of thinking about both the “rise of the novel” and early women writers. Aubin’s fast-paced narratives highlight the persistence and vitality of romance as a form of storytelling and the centrality of teenaged girls to tales that extend far beyond the domestic and amatory modes with which they have traditionally been associated. Aubin’s resourceful heroines and the often spectacular violence they engage in in order to defend their lives and bodily integrity allow us a more expansive and exciting view of early-eighteenth-century fiction than the current classroom canon often permits. In narratives spanning the globe and featuring pirates, North African corsairs, Jacobites, shipwrecks, and seraglios, Aubin delivers fiction with roots that go back to antiquity and commitments that feel far more modern than most other texts from the period.
Supplementary materials include selections from Aubin’s other work in which she reflects upon her craft and the two documents most responsible for the posthumous distortion of her reputation.
