DescriptionThis dissertation argues that key eighteenth-century women writers privileged female-centered networks of obligation over dutiful submission to patriarchal figures. I locate these networks of obligation in eighteenth-century novels that have been otherwise ignored or cited as examples of women’s subordination. Duty is still at the heart of the eighteenth-century novel, I suggest, just not always in the ways that we have imagined. This redefinition of duty allowed authors to imagine their heroines as ethical subjects: by focusing on what women have always owed one another rather than what they owe men, duty is reestablished as an end-unto-itself rather than a stepping-stone to the “happy ending” of marriage or heavenly reward. I therefore suggest that women writers defer, redistribute, or ironize moments of narrative closure to establish new novelistic temporalities that see “the end” as largely beside the point. While the history of the novel traditionally underscores the emergence of the individualized, rights-bearing subject, I draw on affect and queer theory in addition to narratology to identify an alternative history that centers communities of obligation wherein women can access community-centered ethical subjectivity. The first half of my dissertation is devoted to texts that challenge the conventional relationship between duty and reward, both thematically, by embracing personal unhappiness as the cost of living an ethical life, and formally, by deferring narrative closure and withholding a conventional happy ending. In Chapter 1, I argue that Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), a sentimental novel in which the heroine renounces her unfaithful lover at her mother’s behest, models a cross-generational network of obligation that offers purpose (if not happiness) for women. My second chapter turns to Sarah Scott’s feminist utopia, Millenium Hall (1762). Like Sheridan’s Sidney Bidulph, the heroines of Scott’s novel develop a system of female obligation that sees duty as its own reward rather than a stepping-stone to future happiness. In the case of Millenium Hall, the call of feminine duty exceeds filial/maternal bonds to become a large-scale, shared charitable project that further widens the notion of who women owe and why. My third and fourth chapters turn to writers and heroines of the later eighteenth century. Chapter 3 argues that Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft objectify and politicize their heroines’ unhappy feelings and histories to convert affect into a political tool. In Chapter 4, I argue that Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility challenges Adam Smith’s model of triangulated sympathy by introducing a new ethics wherein women can care for one another and themselves by both offering and rejecting sympathy freely.