Rowe, Elizabeth - John J. Richetti (essay date 1969)
John J. Richetti (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: "The Novel as Pious Polemic," in Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrtive Patterns 1700–1739, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 211–61.
[In the following excerpt from a discussion of the novel as pious polemic, Richetti analyzes Rowe's writings and their widespread popularity.]
It is a short and logical step from creating a fictional moral centre like Galesia to having a well-known female paragon write fiction and lend it her personal cachet. This is precisely what took place in 1728 when Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe published Friendship in Death: in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living.1
In 1723 Mrs. Aubin had dedicated her novel, The Life of Charlotta du Pont, to her 'much honoured Friend, Mrs. Rowe', of whose friendship she declared herself to be very proud.2 Whether they were actually intimate friends is uncertain, but both ladies...
[The entire page is 8890 words long]
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