New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2013. While nineteenth-century literary scholars have long been interested in women's agency in the context of their legal status as objects, this study makes the striking and original argument that what we find at the intersection between women subjects (who choose and enter into contracts) and women objects (owned and defined by fathers, husbands, and the law) is curiosity. Women protagonists in the novel are always both curiosities: strange objects worthy of our interest and actors who are themselves actively curious-relentless askers of questions, even (and perhaps especially) when they are commanded to be content and passive.