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In The Historical Novel, Georg Lukács (1937) describes a post-1848 crisis of bourgeois realism in which “a more conscious sense of history” impressed itself upon “the widest circles of bourgeois society,” even those “not in the least interested. . . or aware that a change had taken place.” Opportunism, decline, and decadence are its markers, and “a double and contradictory subjectivism.” Yet, for all of what Lukács referred to as the “subjective arbitrariness” of the writers, their “conception of history. . . is nevertheless an honest protest against the ugliness and sordid trivialization of their capitalist present.” This course in the bourgeois realist novel explores a spectrum of female subjectivities from different classes. Patterns of bourgeois consumption and production—or lack thereof, as the case may be—will be of recurring interest, as will the novels’ representations of history, whether the Napoleonic Wars in the foreground or the July Monarchy in the background. A central concern in each of these novels will be the way in which each female subject is defined and dramatized in relation to her social and domestic milieu. Finally, we will dedicate substantial discussion to the construction of these “loose baggy monsters,” as Henry James referred to large nineteenth-century novels. We will study these novels as works of a particular genre that reached its apotheosis during the bourgeois era, conducting our aesthetic inquiry predominantly through the criticism of the novelist Virginia Woolf. Author of material feminist critiques such as A Room of One’s Own, the literary critic Woolf can help us lift the female subject (Becky Sharp, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Tess) from the bourgeois crisis in which she is entangled. We will read all non-English language novels in translation; however, those among us with working knowledge of French will look at brief sections in the original in order to analyze what Flaubert accomplishes at the level of language.