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Boredom, not one of the topics featured in romances or cherished in tales aspiring to be thrilling or action-packed, is a persistent theme of satire and the grotesque. For instance, one of the great moments in literature near the beginning of the modern period occurs in Jane Austen’sEmma(1816) at the famed Box-Hill picnic and “exploration.” Dances and outings, for the village and country gentry, occur seldom, and out of dullness, everyone is overly enthused about the upcoming “gipsy party” occasion. But for whatever reason, that occasion does not measure up to expectations; tensions mount, and the company is

In the first of the above quotations, Lawrence Stone retells what Amanda Vickery calls a ‘resonant tale of a female descent into indolence and luxury’.³ As John Sekora notes, ‘ luxury’ has long been associated with women and the feminine, and its eighteenth-century manifestation as the debilitating consequence of commercial success proves no exception to this rule.⁴ According to Vickery, however, accounts of a female fall into luxury form an erroneous narrative that has been repeated by generations of historians and literary critics, who have failed to address the variety of ways in which work continued to feature in women’s