Overview
Effie Harrington is a fifth-year PhD Candidate in the department of English at Duke University. She received a B.A. in English Literature and Religious & Theological Studies from Salve Regina University, and an M.A. in English from Syracuse University. Her dissertation focuses on the seduction/rape plot in the woman-authored Romantic-era novel. While previous seduction/rape plots adopted an epistolary form to present the rapist-seducer's perspective alongside the paradigmatically female victim’s perspective, woman novelists of the Romantic period adopted different narrative strategies to make the female victim's perspective the only and authoritative perspecitve on sexual harm. She argues that writers like Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley develop an understanding of sexual harm according to the private sentiments of their female victims, which work outside or against legal definitions of sexual violation.