tailieunhanh - Women, Accounting, and Narrative: Keeping books in eighteenth-century England

The words that recur in the literature of an age offer clues to contemporary fascinations and anxieties. In the eighteenth century, “account” is such a word, taking various forms and conveying multiple meanings. Account, accounting, accountable: the words are found everywhere from tutelary texts to novels, particularly – it turns out – in literature about and directed toward women. In eighteenth-century usage, “account” denoted supposedly true histories as well as fictitious chronicles, encompassed simple financial sums as well as complex double-entry bookkeeping, described Protestant debt–credit relationships to God as well as social ties exacting in their reciprocal economic responsibility | Women Accounting and Narrative Keeping books in eighteenth-century England Rebecca Elisabeth Connor p Routledge Taylor Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK Also available as a printed book see title verso for ISBN details Women Accounting and Narrative In the early eighteenth century the household accountant was traditionally female. However just as women were seen as financial accountants they were also deeply associated with the literary and narrative accounting inherent in letters and diaries. This book examines these socio-linguistic acts of feminized accounting alongside property originality and the development of the early novel. The book begins with an investigation of the reconceptualization of value that occurred between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. While women were often denied inheritance of land their fortunes were increasingly realized in moveable wealth textiles furniture plate jewelry and money. The value of such items necessarily required documentation in the form of accounts yet accounts did more than keep track of possessions. The author shows how numbers were used to record experience and create subjectivity becoming a means of defining the self. The century s near-obsession with keeping books can be seen in women s almanac-diaries - where owners documented everything from sociability to thrift - and also extended to literature. Two female-narrated novels - Aphra Behn s Fair Jilt and Daniel Defoe s Moll Flanders - are then examined questioning the way in which the century s preoccupation with accounting manifested itself differently in novels of the time. The book concludes with an examination of the developing relationship between property narrative and personality. The picaresque an older form of narrative which charts the search for real property or land is contrasted with the novel of personality which charts the search for personal property or money. The relationship of doubly accounting women to contemporary conceptions