This book investigates the critical importance of women to the eighteenth-century debate on property as conducted in the fiction of the period. April London argues that contemporary novels offered several, often conflicting, interpretations of the relation of women to property, ranging from straightforward assertions of equivalence between women and things to subtle explorations of the forms of possession open to those denied a full civic identity. Her wide-ranging study discusses the work of a variety of writers, from Samuel Richardson and Henry Mackenzie to Clara Reeve and Jane West.