A fascinating and underexplored feature of the English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel is that, whether written by man or woman, the -female--narrated text codes and thematizes narrative travail. Female self-telling in these works is impelled and accompanied by psychic, rhetorical, even physical pain. This book focuses on this phenomenon, beginning with a non-essentialized definition of a -woman's text.- Thorell Porter Tsomondo offers a fresh and useful frame of reference for understanding the tradition - present from the origins of the novel - of narrative from a marginalized position, a position instructed not just by gender but by class, colonial and postcolonial politics, and the exigencies of the narrative terrain itself."