My PhD ‘Patriarchal Puppets or Feminist Figurines?: The Doll in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Women’s Writing’, examines women writers who challenge perceptions of gendered subjectivity by engaging with the figure of the doll; considering this figure in relation to sexuality, monstrosity and posthumanism. The project largely focuses on neglected Anglo-American women’s writing by twentieth-century authors, including Margery Lawrence, Daphne du Maurier, Margaret Yorke and Thea Von Harbou, and twenty-first-century texts, including ‘Doll: A Romance of Mississippi’ (2005), The Heart Goes Last (2015), The Silent Companions (2017) and Frankissstein (2019), to explore and interpret connections across a hitherto unrecognised corpus of works that focus on this figure of female gender identity. It also draws on late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and periodicals, such as The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1847), as a touchstone for the doll’s alignment with female submission.