DescriptionThe eighteenth century saw the emergence of two primary literary forms aimed at influencing public life: the satire and the sentimental novel. While these two forms pursued similar goals, they were produced separately until Laurence Sterne’s mingling of the two genres in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. This text combines two previously gendered genres while also undermining male authority with its narrative false starts and symbolically impotent narrator. It also displays satirical and sentimental impulses with the character parson Yorick, who embodies both the Quixote figure and the philosopher-physician who “heals” him. Sterne’s collapsing of these gender and generic boundaries, I argue, would open a discursive space for women to enter the literary world as satirists, as this study will demonstrate using works by Charlotte Lennox and Frances Burney. Lennox’s The Female Quixote, which came before Sterne’s novel, will be considered for its satire of female readers of romances, while Burney’s play The Witlings will show how women engaged in satiric regulation of the public sphere post-Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s radical challenge to the male institutions of satire and the realistic novel, I argue, allowed women to engage in the unprecedented production of satirical texts that tackle public as well as domestic concerns.