This work focuses on the issue of women's education in a series of novels written by women in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the surface plots are conservative, thus reaffirming the social order; on the other hand, numerous subversive narrative techniques undermine the surface stories, drawing attention to the consequences of the arbitrary limitations society imposed on middle-class women as well as to the sense of entrapment and the resulting anxieties they experienced. In showing the increasing female readership ways to negotiate between the behavioural codes of a patriarchal society and their own need for personal freedom, these novels can be read as early feminist critiques of society. Contents: Proto-feminism in a series of eighteenth-century novels: "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" - "The Female Quixote" - "Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph" - "Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World" - "Mary: A Fiction" - "A Simple Story" - "The Mysteries of Udolpho" - "Memoirs of Emma Courtney" - "The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria. A Fragment".