Property, education and identity in late eighteenth-century fiction: heroines of disinterest

Virginia H. Cope analyzes the transition to modern ideals of identity by tracking a character type, here called the Heroine of Disinterest, that dominated late eighteenth-century British fiction. Best represented in Frances Burney's 1778 Evelina, the Heroine of Disinterest is a young woman of uncertain birth but unshakeable virtue, manifested in her acts of charity and absolute imperviousness to the lure of wealth and status. Although the selfless heroine and the inheritance plot in which she figures are often dismissed as conventional, this book demonstrates that the character was central to mediating the vexed relations among property, education, and identity, unsettled by the rise of a capitalist ethos. Associating disinterest with women rescued the ancient ideal from extinction while also providing the discursive means to divide subjectivity from proprietorship, opening the way for the Romantic ideal of selfhood as the product of experience and reflection rather than inherited wealth and lineage.