Reviews
"In this fascinating study, Eleanor Wikborg not only maps [a tradition of patriarchial lovers that is strikingly prevalent in eighteenth-century women's fiction] under different, and illuminating, headings; she also analyses the deference shown by the the ideal 'paternal' lover to the young woman as an individual in her own right, concluding that the powerful male 's readiness to bow to the female's moral virtue makes these stories serve as 'conduct books for men.'"
--English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature
"Wikborg's comprehensive and illuminating work shows that there is still a place for separate studies of women novelists in this period, revealing the specific quality of the woman writer's desire."
--The Scriblerian