Davys, Mary | Mary Davys (essay date 1725)
Mary Davys (essay date 1725)
SOURCE: Preface to The Works of Mrs. Davys, 1725, in Eighteenth-Century British Novelists on the Novel, edited by George L. Barnett, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968, pp. 38-39.
[In the following essay, Davys comments on the methods and motivations of her own work.]
'Tis now for some time that those sort of writings called novels have been a great deal out of use and fashion and that the ladies (for whose service they were chiefly designed) have been taken up with amusements of more use and improvement—I mean History and Travels, with which the relation of probable feigned stories can by no means stand in competition. However, these are not without their advantages, and those considerable, too. And it is very likely the chief reason that put them out of vogue was the world's being surfeited with such as were either flat and insipid, or offensive to modesty and good manners, or that they found them...
[The entire page is 963 words long]
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