Her scholarship seeks to define how authors foresee and shape their influence upon readers. Her first book, Jane Austen’s Erotic Advice (Oxford University Press, 2014), interprets didacticism as a seductive rhetorical mode and shows how Austen’s narrators use didactic speech-acts to elicit readerly devotion. Her current book-in-progress, supported recently with grants from the Lewis Walpole Library and the Huntington Library, tracks the rise of the novel in England against the cultural and legal history of guardianship. Tentatively called Author-Guardians in the English Novel, it identifies a strand of novels running from the 18th century to the end of the 19th century in which fictional guardian/ward interactions prefigure novelist/reader relations.