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Zoe McGee on Courting Disaster
2025-11-11 18:30 - 21:00 (Europe/London) | Topping & Company Booksellers of Bath, York Street, Bath, BA1 1NG, United Kingdom
What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think.

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoe McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society’s mind about rape culture – and to reassure survivors they were not alone.

Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.

In an era that’s clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway…

Zoe McGee has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and an MSt in eighteenth-century studies from the University of Oxford. She has spoken at conferences internationally and now performs at very nerdy stand-up comedy nights. Among other things, she has worked as a university teacher, a bookseller and a professional board-game-explainer. She owns too many books and is a competitive ballroom dancer in her spare time.

Zoe will be in conversation with Helena Kelly.

Helena Kelly holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Oxford, where she was most recently a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College. She has also taught at the university, and published in a number of academic journals. She is the author of The Worlds of Jane Austen and Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, and of The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens.

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