Heavy juridical, moral and customary constraints weighed on women at the end of the « long » 18th century in Great Britain. The impact of such constraints on feminine writing touched the various literary strategies as well as the plots in the novels. In order to get round the taboos set by patriarchy - taboos that only touched the world of women – a few women writers used an ingenious kind of satire that ridiculed the faults of a society that forbade them any right to criticise. Researching the context allows us to understand the motives and the techniques of their satirical strategies. This was the time of English and Scottish Enlightenment, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the making of the middle classes. The economy was flourishing and led to a first wave of “mass consumption”. As synecdoches for women for sale or who wanted to be sold, objects and money are the two sides to the critical analysis that underlies the structure of this thesis. Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic re-creation by the reader is used to underline the possible gap in reception between at least two communities of readers and then, through investigation in the context, to arouse new interest for the works by Burney, Austen and Ferrier, some of them really unknown to most. Baudrillard’s theory of consumption has been chosen because it facilitates the reader’s understanding of the characters’ behaviour with respect to objects when the characters in question are the target of satire.
