Courting Disaster

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think. Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Zo McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change societys mind about rape culture and to reassure survivors they were not alone. Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent. In an era thats clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway -- .