Karen Bloom Gevirtz is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Seton Hall University, USA, specializing in eighteenth-century British literature. She is author of Life after Death: Widows and the English Novel, Defoe to Austen (2005) and Women, the Novel, and Natural Philosophy, 1660-1727 (2014), and co-editor of Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660-1820 (2014) with Mona Narain.