ish domestic architecture during the seventeenth century, provided elite women with unprecedented private space at home and in so doing, promised them equally unprecedented autonomy by providing a space for self-fashioning, eroticism, and contemplation. Tita Chico's Designing Women argues that the dressing room becomes a powerful metaphor in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. While satirists--such as Dryden, François Bruys, Gay, Wortley Montagu, John Breval, Elizabeth Thomas, Pope, and Swift--attack the lady's dressing room as a site of individual and social degradation, domestic novelists--including Richardson, Lennox, Burney, Goldsmith, Austen, and Edgeworth--celebrate it as a space for moral, social, and personal amelioration.

As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, the dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature redefines the gendered constitution of private spaces, and offers a corrective to our literary history of generic influence and development between satire and the novel.