Kirsten T. Saxton, Mills College
Vol. 40, No. 1 (Fall 2021), 334-357
This essay uses vignettes from two early fictions by women, Eliza Haywood’s novel Fantomina, or Love in a Maze (1725) and Frances Burney’s novel Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) to explore how glancing encounters produce an archive for future possibility. It suggests that putting new materialist readings of the city in conversation with affective queer theories of the archive makes visible ephemeral notes to the future in the fictions of the past, allowing us to read eighteenth century women writers’ texts not only as evidence of the real limitations of the past (and the present) but as portals to re-imagine alternative, more capacious futures.
