Until the 1980s, when feminism emerged as a major force in novel studies, scholars and critics by and large read novels novelistically. In saying that we read novelistically, I refer to a process by which the critic identifies some kind of lack in the protagonist – a lack that someone or something else must supply. Once the protagonist is supplied with the missing ingredient – for example, Robinson Crusoe with land, Tom Jones with a patrimony, and Edward Waverley with English identity – that protagonist can overcome the obstacle that keeps him from improving his position in life and achieve recognition within the community whose order and vigor he consequently repairs and renews. His lack at once defines the magic ingredient that enables self-fulfillment along with social empowerment and creates the basis of identification for readers who feel that lack and wish to see it fulfilled. Feminist literary theory made a swift and telling intervention in this way of reading British fiction, when it persuaded a whole generation of readers to consider what female protagonists lacked rather than their male counterparts. During the 1980s this way of reading changed not only the novels read and taught in classrooms but also the imagined relationship between individual and nation that compels the identification of reader with protagonist. Feminist critics began to read Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders in place of his Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson's Pamela for Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Jane Austen's Emma rather than Walter Scott's Waverley.