This study is designed as a contribution to gender studies; it examines the (various different) ways in which gender roles are constructed in 18th century educational manuals and novels in English, focussing mainly on the contributions of female authors to bourgeois Enlightenment debate on the socialization of women and the role of women in society. Another concern of the book is to define the position of well-known women authors like Jane Austen or Fanny Burney within the literary landscape of the age, the tendency in the past having been to study them very much in isolation from it. For this purpose the present study marks off a sub-genre termed here weiblicher Erziehungsroman (educational novels by women) and examines the intertextual relations obtaining within that sub-genre. In so doing it seeks not least to rescue a number of less well-known women authors from the scholarly oblivion to which they have been relegated in literary studies.