This talk argues that the female body–central to the legality of birthright and legitimacy–is presented as a form of extralegal evidence in eighteenth-century courts and British novels. I distinguish this argument by uncovering court cases where female emotion, resemblance, and virtue become part of the proceedings and jurist decisions. The presentation then identifies a shift in the latter half of the century, when women’s success within the legal system declines, and narrative jurisprudence responds by depicting women inheriting, bequeathing, and claiming birthright through their own private means. My main claim is that unlike the law, fiction more often allowed women possibilities for agency and private identity. Working with law and affect theory, I examine how emotional and coercive aspects of female birthright and inheritance cases are reworked and reimagined by female novelists, suggesting that narrative becomes a more reliable space for women to be active legal and moral agents.

Dr. Jolene Zigarovich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa, where she teaches and researches at the crossroads of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century body politics, death studies, and queer and trans studies, with particular emphasis on the history of the novel. She regularly teaches courses on the long eighteenth century, women writers, Romanticism, and Gothic literature. In Spring 2021 she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh and in 2021-22 was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam. She is  author of Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel:  Engraved Narratives, and editor of Sex and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature as well as TransGothic in Literature and Culture. Her monograph Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) had the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currently, she is working on two new book projects that engage law and literature, Victorian Necropolitics: Legislating the Dead Body and the Novel, 1847-1874 and Legal Bodies: Women, Economies, and the Law in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.