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Every once in a while, a book comes along that makes you look at familiar novels with completely new eyes. Courting Disaster by Dr. Zoë McGee is one of those rare reads.
At first glance, it’s easy to think that conversations about consent and gender power dynamics belong to our modern world—but as McGee reveals, women writers have been exploring these issues for centuries. From Jane Austen and Frances Burney to their now-forgotten contemporaries, McGee traces how the early novel became a space where women could question, resist, and reimagine the rules of society.
Blending literary analysis with a storyteller’s charm, Courting Disaster uncovers how these authors used their fiction to challenge ideas about marriage, desire, and female agency—long before hashtags or social movements existed. The result is part history, part feminist manifesto, and entirely engaging.
What I loved most is how McGee manages to connect Austen’s delicate irony with the urgent issues we’re still discussing today. She reminds us that beneath the polite dances and witty dialogue, there was always a deeper conversation happening about autonomy and consent. And she does so with warmth, humor, and an infectious passion for her subject.
Courting Disaster invites us to see Austen and her peers not just as chroniclers of romance, but as quiet revolutionaries—women who understood that every novel about marriage is also, in its own way, a novel about power.
Publishing 4 November 2025 with Manchester University Press, this book is a must-read for anyone who loves Austen, feminist history or simply wants to understand how much the past still shapes our present.
Have you ever noticed how Austen’s stories hint at the boundaries of consent and social expectation? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
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