Publication Date: 1 July 2003	$36.00 · £25.50
UK publication date: 11 July 2003	0-226-76860-0

Today we consider privacy a right that is endangered. From satellite surveillance and workplace email to databases full of medical, consumer, and political information, our every move is becoming bar-coded or tracked without our consent. Even the department of homeland security—an institution created to protect us—has inspired grave fears that our privacy will soon be routinely invaded.

Imagine if you can, then, a time when people didn't fear the death of privacy as much as the idea of privacy itself. In this lively and original book, Patricia Meyer Spacks, author of the critically acclaimed work, Boredom, takes us back to eighteenth-century England, where privacy was seen as a problem, even a threat. It was an age, she shows, when people hiding their true thoughts and motives from one another generated fears of uncontrollable fantasies and profound anxieties about insincerity.

Privacy explores eighteenth-century concerns about privacy and the strategies people developed to avoid public scrutiny and social pressure. Spacks examines the way people hid behind common rules of etiquette to mask their innermost feelings, and how people learned to employ such devices. She considers too the erotic overtones that privacy aroused in its suppression of deeper desires. And most important, she explores the idea of privacy as a societal threat, one that bred pretense and deceit in its practitioners. Through inspired readings of novels by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, along with a penetrating glimpse into diaries, autobiographies, poems, and works of pornography, Spacks ultimately reveals how writers charted the imaginative possibilities of privacy and its social repercussions.

Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, Spacks's new work will fascinate anyone who has relished concealment or mourned its recent demise.

Patricia Meyer Spacks is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of eleven previous books, including Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels and Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, both published by the University of Chicago Press.