From polite society to the Pilbara: The ingénue abroad in Evelina and The Girl in Steel-Capped Boots

• Published in: Outskirts (Nedlands) Vol. 38; pp. 1 - 23
• Main Authors: O’Mahony, Lauren, Murphy, Olivia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Crawley The University of Western Australia, Centre for Women's Studies 01.05.2018
• Subjects: 18th century; 19th century; Attention; Austen, Jane (1775-1817); British & Irish literature; Burney, Fanny (1752-1840); Diaries; English literature; Females; Feminism; Fiction; Fielding, Henry (1707-1754); Gender; Genre; Intertextuality; Novels; Politics; Prejudice; Reader interest; Rhetorical figures; Romances; Scholars; Sexism; Stereotypes; Womens literature; New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 1445-0445

The romance novel-persistently at once one of the most popularly successful genres from the eighteenth century to today, and one of the least critically respected-demonstrates surprising consistencies, and a habitual attention to gender politics that reflect the gendered assumptions and aspirations of the societies out of which it emerges. This paper explores the commonalities between two novels that, despite being produced in different times and places, nevertheless when read together share distinct concerns and tropes, often to a surprising extent. By reading Frances Burney's Evelina (1778) and Loretta Hill's The Giri in Steel-Capped Boots (2012), and paying close attention to their similarities and differences, this paper demonstrates continuities of convention over more than two centuries. Both novels take young, inexperienced women for their heroines, and through them introduce their readers to daily life in specific, closed communities: respectively, fashionable London of the late-eighteenth-century "Season", and the fly-in, fly-out mining society of the West Australian Pilbara region. In this study of two novels, one published in Georgian England, and the other in early twenty-first-century Australia, it is possible to recognise the ways in which such fictions are capable of idealising, reproducing and reinforcing gendered stereotypes, and at the same time of revealing the oppressive effects of such stereotypes on the imagined lives of men and women.