Nancy K. Miller 
French Dressing [PDF ebook] 
Women, Men, and Fiction in the Ancien Regime

French Dressing looks at the ancien regime’s scenarios of libertine seduction–unsafe sex and its consequences for women’s lives. It places the gender performances of male and female-authored novels in dialogue in order to recover the complexity of a century obsessed, as we are today, with writing and living plots of desire. French Dressing exposes the erotic anxieties behind a national culture of sexual self-display–French undressing.