This book has shown that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are collectively more telling about the gender politics of the era spanning the start of the Anglo- French War and the Battle of Waterloo than scholars have previously acknowledged. Visuality, which functions as a coded continuum linking visual and verbal modes of communication and understanding, empowered women novelists at a time when selfexpression was particularly constrained for their sex, allowing them to control the gaze and speak through pictures. My analysis of the novels of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Frances Burney has demonstrated that visuality provided them with a methodology capable of depicting and negotiating the ways in which women ‘should’ see, appear and think in a society in which the reputation was image based.

Many factors contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gaze in women's fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The novels that this study has discussed underscore culture's role in shaping perceptions and calibrating gendered definitions of acceptable display. From the novelties of Vauxhall Gardens to the eye- catching sights at portraiture exhibitions, the act of looking became increasingly selfconscious and culturally choreographed. The era's preoccupation with Taste, popularized by Addison's discussions in the Spectator, reshaped the relationship between depiction and description, combining visual and verbal communication in ekphrastic representations that depicted one medium through another. His claim that ‘well- chosen’ words produce a more convincing sight in the imagination than does the image itself helps explain how women used an economy of detail to their diplomatic advantage in order to speak ‘freely’ while preserving their reputations as respectable women.

Society's absorption of Lavater's physiognomic principles and Reynolds's Discourses on Art influenced vision and depiction in a manner that produced corresponding fluctuations in the level of detail deemed necessary, or appropriate, to communicate. Views of women also shifted. Women novelists seized upon the Enlightenment's campaign for human rights and looked to the French Revolution's model of questioning conventional perceptions of their sex. Wollstonecraft's call for ‘a REVOLUTION in female manners’ recognized that universal progress and rhetorical liberation would have to start in the domestic sphere.