Ehrlich, ManonIn Europe during the long nineteenth century, despite being relegated to the private sphere and excluded from the realms of national and international politics, women were increasingly exposed to the effects of global movements. Novels written by women, while generally dismissed because of their narrative emphasis on domestic matters, constitute important literary tools to reevaluate the historical processes of globalization through a female lens. In connecting the texts of English novelist Jane Austen, French author George Sand, and French-speaking writer Isabelle Eberhardt to contemporary global dynamics, this dissertation registers expressions of transnational mobility in their writings and argues for the formation of a cosmopolitan consciousness in nineteenth-century women’s literature. By adopting a transnational and comparatist approach that fosters interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism, this project proposes an out-scaled reading strategy to understand past female experiences in a new light. In thus challenging the boundaries of knowledge for works produced during the long nineteenth-century that have been previously read mostly as national products, this study charts the gradual re-orientation of these novels’ focus from the home to the world. Given the (geo)political and archival value of those texts as relates to the development of a global culture in the nineteenth century, this dissertation proposes a method of interpreting that helps to recover international history in the context of women’s writing. In order to capture the shifting relationship between the authors’ viewing of the world, but also their being-in-the-world, this study is divided along two sections: the formation of a transnational textual space (1) and the authors’ engagement with political matters and their subversive contribution to international history-making (2). In learning to feel at home in the world, but also to navigate the tension between the social pull of the domestic sphere and the centrifugal desire to transcend the limits to their gendered experience, these writers show us that nineteenth-century literature is more relevant than ever. Indeed, in offering us keys to negotiate in-between spaces and conflicting orientations, women writers in the long nineteenth century can help us cope with the complexities and challenges of living between the national and the global in the twenty-first century.enDissertationComparative literatureLiteratureWomen's studies