SOURCE: “Letter Fiction and the Search for Human Nature” and “Romantic Love and Sexual Fantasy in Epistolary Fiction,” in Women, Letters, and the Novel, AMS Press, 1980, pp. 1-26; 137-67.

[In the first excerpt below, Perry describes the social and economic conditions of early eighteenth-century England and their influence of the surging popularity of epistolary fiction, a literary genre that offered unprecedented opportunity for women writers and their concerns. In the second excerpt, she discusses the changing sexual mores of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and how this was depicted in the romantic fantasies of epistolary fiction.]

London was a brutal and disorderly place in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Ruffians lurked in the dirty, badly lit streets to rob and harass the wealthier citizens. John Evelyn was robbed several times at home and on the road. Samuel Pepys reports lying afraid in his bed at night, sure that the sounds he was hearing were thieves breaking into his house to steal his beloved possessions. Although the laws against theft were extreme—stealing a kerchief could be punished by death¹—there continued to be a sizable criminal sub-culture of the sort described by Defoe in Moll Flanders.

In 1705 London's Common Council appointed more watchmen to keep peace in public streets; this action did not have its desired effect, though, for five years later it was reported that

of late many loose, idle, and disorderly Persons have used in the Evenings, in a riotous and tumultuous Manner, to gather together in the Streets and other Passages of this city, and the Suburbs thereof; where they make Bonfires and Illuminations, stop the Coaches and assault the Persons of the Inhabitants, and other her Majesty's subjects who happen to pass by on their lawful Occasions, insult their Houses, break their Windows, forcibly and illegally demand Money of them. …²

In 1718 the City Marshall reported

the general complaint of the taverns, the coffee-houses, the shop-keepers and others that their customers are afraid when it is dark to come to their houses and shops for fear that their hats and wigs should be snitched from their heads or their swords taken from their sides, or that they may be blinded, knocked down, cut or stabbed; Nay, the coaches cannot secure them, but they are likewise cut and robbed in the public streets, etc.³

Some of this crime was malicious, willful, unmotivated by material need. There were, for instance, a band of local hoodlums,

who call themselves Hawkubites, and their mischievous invention of the work is, that they take people between hawk and buzzard, that is, between two of them, and making them turn from one to the other, abuse them with blows and scoffings; and if they pretend to speak for themselves, they then slit their noses, or cut them down the back.⁴

There were also a growing number of prostitutes, supplied by the influx of country girls who came to London, helpless and unsuspecting as one depicted in Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress, unable to survive the disruptions of enclosure and industrialization in their native towns, and seeking employment as servants in the growing city.⁵ The many remedies for venereal disease advertised in the London newspapers in the 1720s is probably a good index of their increased activity.⁶ And along the road leading out of London lay an appalling number of abandoned children, both dead and alive.⁷

In fact, living conditions in London in 1700 were so bad that the death rate (one in twenty-five) far exceeded the birth rate, a fact which alarmed a number of natural philosophers who wrote about the necessity for marriage and having more children.⁸ This extraordinarily high waste of life in the city occurred because of too much poisonous gin (more stringent liquor licensing laws were not passed until 1751), unsanitary quarters, bad food, disease, etc. Throughout the eighteenth century the population of London had to be continually replenished by people pouring in from other towns and from the countryside.⁹

The rising numbers of marginal individuals without community or respectable work, and the squalor into which the city absorbed them, were signs of a society moving from an agricultural economy toward an industrial one. In many ways, the intellectual and philosophical changes in the culture were reflections of this critical economic shift. The old authorities were gone: the seventeenth century witnessed both the execution of the legitimate king and widespread religious dissent from traditional theology; nor had these orthodox sources of truth yet been repaired or replaced. It was an era in which abundant satire testified to the moral confusion, to the hypocritical gaps between pretended and actual standards. The culture paid lip service to the comfortable philosophy of the “great chain of being,” in which individuals were required to blindly live out their parts in a Divine Plan so complicated that no one but God could understand its entire and perfect justice. Yet this philosophy was at odds with the newer spirit of entrepreneurial individualism which accompanied expanding trade and capitalism.

The literature is full of these contradictory signals. Robinson Crusoe, Pamela Andrews, Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, all begin their adventures by leaving home, going off on their own, but each suffers for that willfulness and each is made to see the impossibility, in a social world, of doing exactly as one pleases. In each case, however, their enterprising spirit is rewarded as each achieves a higher station in life than that in which he or she began. This pattern is perhaps clearest in Robinson Crusoe where the sin committed by the hero—self-determination—is punishable by twenty-odd years of solitude and then rewarded with wealth.

Many of the criminal biographies, so popular in the early part of the eighteenth century, were shaped the same way, making it clear that each scoundrel's first important misstep had been “individualism,” ignoring Providence, and believing too exclusively in himself. Certainly this was the cause of Moll Flanders' unhappiness as well as of her success, and Defoe shows his readers at the end of that book that the only way to win personal salvation and public acclaim was to submit to the laws of God and of society. Similarly, the later parts of Pamela and of Robinson Crusoe are about the reclaiming of the individual by society: Pamela must learn to be the mistress of a bourgeois establishment, to fit into society at her new station, and Robinson Crusoe must cope with his sailors and the colony established on his once isolated and peaceful island. The attempt was to strike a new balance, to redefine the relation between needs of individuals and the rules of the larger society.

In the midst of these confusions, without clear ethical standards for living or unalterable social and economic places in which to fit, there was a growing belief that reason, aided by facts collected empirically, could supply the answers no longer provided by traditional religion or a divine-right monarchy. It was believed possible to understand human nature and prescribe rules for a healthy life through study and analysis rather than through revelation. After all, the seventeenth century had seen the discovery of the laws governing the universe; now it was time to do the same for humankind. As Ernst Cassirer observes:

The whole eighteenth century is permeated by this conviction, namely, that in the history of humanity the time had now arrived to deprive nature of its carefully guarded secret, to leave it no longer in the dark to be marveled at as an incomprehensible mystery but to bring it under the bright light of reason and analyze it with all its fundamental force.¹⁰

The Royal Society, operating since 1660 with its studies of mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and the natural sciences, was the institutional manifestation of the faith in the new methods of pursuing knowledge. Swift's materials for the satire of the experimenting mania in book III of Gulliver's Travels were not invented by him but came from the pages of Philosophical Transactions. Robert Boyle, for example, (who first enunciated the law that the volume of a gas varies inversely with pressure) was one of those who supplied him with instances in which the drive to corroborate scientific constructs with systematically gathered information exceeded the bounds of common sense. When Boyle described a blind Dutchman who could distinguish color by touch, “his most exquisite perception is in his thumb,” and described his data with as much precision as in his more plausible experiments, Swift transformed the report into the blind man in Lagado who mixed colors for painters.¹¹

Nor was curiosity the exclusive quality of a specialized group of academics. There was, at that time, a thirst for information among all those with the leisure and means to pursue it. The educated Englishman characteristically wanted to know more about the world in which he lived and about the people who inhabited it. A Frenchman visiting London in the early part of the century was struck by how universal was the English appetite for information and wrote home about it in this way:

There are many shabby cafes in London with furniture which is worn because of the numbers of people frequenting them … What attracts the people to the cafes are the gazettes and other public papers. The English are great newsmongers. Most workers begin their day by going to a cafe to read the news. I have often seen bootblacks and others of that sort getting together to buy each day's gazette for a half-farthing and to read it together … There are a dozen different gazettes in London, some which come out every day, some twice a week and some weekly. One can read the news from other countries usually taken from the Holland Gazette. The articles on London are always the longest, one can learn of the marriage and death of people of quality, of civil, military and clerical appointments, and anything else of interest, comic and tragic, in this great city.¹²

The tastes of an increasingly literate public were beginning to determine what was printed in England, unlike in earlier times when writing was an aristocratic pursuit for a very select audience. Writers had to convince booksellers that their works could sell widely; it was no longer a matter of simply pleasing an aristocracy. Visual art, too, was moving toward public subscription rather than the patronage system with the establishment of the first academy of painting in 1711.¹³ Newspapers were one of the visible signs of the demands of this new, broader audience. Indeed, modern notions of journalism—of simple, factual, objective, informative reporting—can be traced to this period. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 which had been a curb to publishing also encouraged the proliferation of this cheap reading matter. Coffee houses attracted customers by supplying newspapers to their clientele along with the latest beverages from the New World.

The popular demand for informative reading is also recognizable in the longer literary forms which sold well during the early part of the century. There were tales of travel, secret and not so secret histories of lives, and collections of letters. Certain terms recurred again and again in the titles of fiction: “history,” “memoirs,” “life,” “voyage,” “adventure,” “account,” “letters.”¹⁴ All of these forms were supposedly derived from materials which were authentic rather than fictional, for the public seemed to want to be informed about all the strange and marvelous permutations possible in real life.

The travel books were partly the result of the growth of capitalism: the impulse to accrue and the necessity for finding new business sent Englishmen all the way around the world, to return to talk of new lands and foreign people. As early as 1680 The Royal Society had shown an official interest in the accounts of travelers¹⁵ and Evelyn's diary of August 6, 1698 reports the excitement of dining “at Mr. Pepys, where was Cap: Dampier, who had been a famous Buccaneere, brought hither the painted Prince Jolo, printed a Relation of his very strange adventures,” discussing the errors in existing maps of the South Pacific.¹⁶ Of course by 1720, this interest in the exotic South Pacific had grown sufficiently to blow up the famous South Sea bubble.

The letter, as form, was a perfect frame for travel reports or essays of any length and on any subject in this new age which so valued collecting information. (Indeed, the earliest newspapers were no more than batches of informative letters published together.)¹⁷ Tone could range from impersonal journalistic human interest stories, to pedantic ethnographies, to ponderous theological debates, to sensational disclosures. Edward Ward, for example, was a hack writer who liked to masquerade his sensational exposés as on-the-scene reports back home in the form of letters.¹⁸ While some had recourse to letters to debate the tenets of Quakerism or to detail foreign cultures, popular writers like Ward framed anything that might sell in a letter format.

Travel books were so popular by that time that after theology books they were the second most numerous kind of book published. But stories of voyages are also metaphoric expressions of testing limits. They are quite literally about how far one can go, pushing at boundaries, reducing unknowns to knowns. The travel literature which provided the public with anthropological lore about other civilizations often compared them to English society with an eye to finding out what was considered natural in other cultures, what customs corroborated one's own certainties about human limitations. Other environments were especially interesting for what they could show individuals about their own world. English courtship and marriage customs, in particular, were often compared to other cultures as if these differences could teach one how all of it ought to be done. Travel stories were also suitable as allegories of the favorite Puritan sort about losing and then finding one's way—wrestling with one's rebellious mind, straying into psychically alien territory, but finally turning homeward to the proper English way of life.

Pirate tales and criminal biographies, also very popular in the early part of the century, helped define good and evil in ways it would be hard to duplicate, with their examples of gratuitous and unreasoning violence at the extremes of human cruelty.¹⁹ Indeed, the very interest in criminality presupposes an allegiance to law and order; it assumes that there is some basic standard from which deviations are made. There was an interest in unlawfulness for the same reasons that there was an interest in making up rules for living. Because man was still the most uncontrollable and unpredictable element in his own world, there was a need to examine the outer edges of human experience, in order to define the natural limits of the passions. So although the success of the criminal biographies can be explained by popular craving for the lurid and sensational, it could also be argued that these biographies satisfied a taste for the details about those who ended on the gallows, a curiosity as to how their lives led in that direction, what their experience consisted of, and how they came to be what they were. In fact, these accounts often did come from the records kept and published by the institutions processing these criminals, from reports of the trials at Old Bailey, and from published accounts which Newgate prison chaplains wrote about the last hours and confessions of criminals they had worked with. These chaplains sold their accounts for money and for the glory they earned with stories of their spiritual prowess in last minute conversions.²⁰

It was an age of sermons, laws, rules, and fictionalized explorations of conduct and consequences, an age that believed reason could educate feeling. Therefore a market existed for books of advice on how to behave in even the most intimate moments of one's life. Popular writers of the day were certainly aware of that audience: John Dunton's The Athenian Spy (1704) was ready “to direct the Bachelor and the Virgin in their whole amour”²¹ and Edward Ward's Marriage Dialogues (1708) meant to show those “unhappy in the Marry'd State” “where the fault lies.” Defoe, always willing to supply the needs of the reading public, contributed The Family Instructor (1715), a collection of sample dialogues for sticky situations which might occur between a father and son, or a mother and daughter—a “how-to-do-it” manual for family life—and Conjugal Lewdness (1727) which warns married couples at great length against too heavy an emphasis on the sexual side of their union. It should be remembered, too, that Richardson's letter-writing manual offered directives to its readers for a good deal more than style. It would seem that many readers were looking for instruction in how to think and feel.

The many tales of love affairs bought eagerly by the public at this time often featured a moralizing editorial statement between the episodes of passion, dwelling on the degree to which emotion could obliterate conscience and pervert social relationships. Love always broke all the rules, and created lawless behavior. As one novelist put it,

Reason, Religion, and even the Will is subservient to that all-powerful Passion which forces us sometimes to Actions our Natures most detest; Mother against Daughter, Father against Son, contrives; all Obligations of Blood and Interest are no more remember'd; over every Bound we leap, to gratify the wild Desire, and Conscience but vainly interposes its Remonstrances.²²

Perhaps there was a delicious horror in reading about such “wild Desire” for the issue of what “our Natures most detest” or the “Obligations of Blood and Interest” were not easily defined. Stories of anarchic emotion teased the imagination with the real range of human choices. Excessive desire, difficult to control and predict at best, could push a person beyond self-control. Thus an early marriage manual advises against incest “lest the Friendship a Man bears to such a woman be immoderate; for … if the conjugal Affection be full and betwixt them as it ought to be, and that it be over and above surcharged with that kindred too, there is no doubt but such an Addition will carry the Husband beyond the Bounds of Reason.”²³ Love could lead to madness; indeed it was seen as a kind of temporary insanity in which “Rape, Murder, everything that is shocking to Nature, and Humanity had in them Ideas less terrible than what despairing love presented …”²⁴ Thus such tales demonstrated what social philosophers believed at that time—that people were held in check only by the laws and customs which regulated individual passions, that they were creatures of appetite whose instincts headed them toward chaos but for the restraints of reason.

Sometimes these love stories were offered up in a spirit of scientific humanism, as case studies in emotion. Like the criminal biographies they offered a close up view of the uncivilized side of human nature. This rationale was all the more convincing as the conventions which defined fiction became increasingly realistic; for as one popular writer pointed out, moral prescriptions based on fictional lives are more likely heeded when “fear of falling into the like Misfortunes, causes us to interest ourselves more in their Adventures, because that those sorts of Accidents may happen to all the World; and it touches so much the more because they are the common Effects of Nature.”²⁵ The public wanted more of the sense that such stories were based on “real life” and that one could learn from individual cases. In 1705 Mrs. Manley announced this literary trend: the fad for French romances was “very much abated” and “Little Histories” had taken their place.²⁶ In 1719 Defoe assured his readers that “a private Man's Adventures in the World were worth making Publick.”

Some of the “Little Histories” of that time strain the modern sense of realism considerably. Take, for example, this letter from a servant girl asking advice of an all-knowing seer about her affair with her master:

I believe, indeed, he has a great Respect for me, for he always takes care to cut the best bit of the Meat, or Fowl, or whatever we have for our Dinner, and lay it on his Plate as if he design'd to eat it himself, and leaves it for me.²⁷

This detail, touching in its homeliness, is meant to testify to the everyday reality of the tale and to give the reader some insight into the experience of the character. Yet in its own way, it is as naively romantic as a story of a damsel saved from distress.

Nevertheless, the effect of writing vignettes about probable characters rather than allegorical sequences or fantastic adventures, of focusing on concrete physical details rather than falling back on indistinct, stylized descriptions, of shortening length and deflating style, was to blur distinctions between fantasy and mundane reality and make it seem possible to move romance into the realm of daily life. The outlandish and fanciful names of characters in the romances began to be used as the pseudonyms in epistolary fiction, assumed by clandestine correspondents to avoid detection in case their letters were intercepted. It also was becoming literary fashion to write about middle-class heroes and heroines, a practice which the very prolific Eliza Haywood defended in this way:

Those who undertake to write Romances, are always careful to give a high Extraction to their Heroes and Heroines; because it is certain we are apt to take a greater Interest in the Destiny of a Prince than of a private Person. We frequently find, however, among those of a middle State, some, who have Souls as elevated, and Sentiments equally noble with those of the most illustrious Birth: Nor do I see any Reason to the contrary; Nature confines not her Blessings to the Great alone … As the following Sheets, therefore, contain only real Matters of Fact, and have, indeed, something so very surprising in themselves, that they stand not in need of any Embellishments from Fiction: I shall take my Heroine such as I find her, and believe the Reader will easily pass by the Meanness of her Birth, in favour of a thousand other good Qualities she was possess'd of.²⁸

In arguing that human qualities which are worth emulating can be found throughout the population, she at once announces that her book has a moral function and heightens the impression that her characters come from life, that her stories “contain only real Matters of Fact” and “stand not in need of any Embellishments from Fiction.” Nor is this example unique. A passage from the translation of Marivaux' The Life of Marianne (1736) strikes the same notes: there is an inverse snobbishness aimed at those who do not like to read about ordinary people and an implication that the story of a tradesman or commoner is as valuable a “History of the human Heart” as anyone could wish, and probably truer:

There are People whose Vanity creeps into every Thing they do, even into their very Reading. Lay before them the History of the human Heart, among People of great Quality; no Doubt they will think it an important Matter, and well worth their Attention … No Matter for all the rest of Mankind. They barely allow them to live, but judge them with no further Notice. They would even insinuate, that Nature might very well have spared the Production of such Creatures, and that Tradesmen and Commoners are but a Dishonour to her. You may judge then with what Scorn such Readers as these would have looked upon me.²⁹

The day of the poor but honest heroine had arrived, thanks to the demands of a less aristocratic reading public who wanted to read more stories about people from their own class staunchly upholding strict moral codes.

The audience for whom these early novels were written were generally Londoners with enough education and leisure to read, and enough money to buy the books. Since they cost six pence to six shillings at that time (one or two shillings being the common price), they were out of range of all but the well-to-do. Epistolary fiction, sometimes printed piecemeal in magazines, was a little cheaper, installments running only six to twelve pence a week that way.³⁰ The effect of watching the story unfold, of waiting for the next installment, was particularly well suited to the form of a novel told in letters. But whether serially or by volume, reading novels was a taste that only the comfortable classes could indulge. Private entertainment is expensive, and reading one's own book cost a good deal more than communal theater-going which had been the literary amusement of an earlier generation. Still, books were selling better than ever before, and the increased volume of sales kept their price stable in spite of a steady rise in the cost of printing.³¹

Although these books were fairly expensive, the main audience for them was not aristocratic. For one thing, the villainous rakes most often cast as the enemy in these stories came from that class, and the satire tends towards mockery of class distinctions from a middle-class point of view. For example, in Mrs. Davys' Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, there is a butler whose proof of being “a very well-bred Man” is that he “drinks, whores, and games and has just as much Estate as will qualify him for a vote,” as well as an impoverished peer who has gambled away his estate and whose hovel is satirically called “my Lord's chamber.”³² The focus on the heroines in these novels also betrays a particularly middle-class concern, for it was the only class in which men worked and women did not. (Among the laboring classes men and women both worked; aristocratic men and women had similar requirements in the way of duties.) This divergence of role led to great controversy about the nature of their relationship to one another. Then, too, the growing need in landed aristocratic families for middle-class cash made middle-class women upwardly mobile as they had never been before. This intensified the middle-class interest in themes of love, marriage, and the etiquette of sexual fencing.

The letter novel thrived in this context. Middle-class readers could identify with characters who sat down to write letters which told of the agonies of love, or reported experiences of traveling, or revealed secrets, or gave advice, or arranged intrigues. They could read about the thoughts and experiences of these literate heroes and heroines with the appealing illusion that they came directly from the minds of the participants rather than being filtered through the sensibility of an omniscient narrator. The language generally used in epistolary fiction was common rather than literary, and the characters who wrote news to their families or advice to their friends were all plausible types. The letters themselves seemed to be proof that such people really existed and that following their lives was not merely self-indulgent escape, but informative reading about first-hand experience.

Certainly the most interesting experiments in realistic fiction of the day were books written like autobiography—Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe or letter novels. The public must have enjoyed such first-hand writing, for columns of letters of complaints, advice, or confession written to editors of newspapers and gazettes by private individuals were so successful that editors imitated them, and featured professionally written ones concocted to read like unsolicited letters. It was simply easier to commission them than to collect them, and the public was always curious about others like themselves, isolated in their separate lives within the big city.

Because letters were the obvious medium for exchanging informal and personal news between intimates, they also perfectly illustrated stories of relationships. The epistolary mode gave an objective cast to such stories, as if they were data collected from actual experience demonstrating the natural extremes of feeling and depicting human problems. Even the titles of epistolary novels sometimes seem to lay claim to special truth about human states like curiosity or love or constancy or jealousy or innocence, as if the letters made it possible to abstract and isolate them for special study in each story: “The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity,” “Fantomina, or Love in a Maze,” “The Fatal Secret or Constancy in Distress,” “The Penitant Hermit or The Fruits of Jealousy,” “The Player's Tragedy or Fatal Love,” “The Brothers or Treachery Punish'd” (italics mine).

This kind of epistolary writing tended to be very much in demand in the forty years or so which preceded Richardson's Pamela, perhaps because it satisfied the public taste for “realism” or seemed to provide documentation for moral dilemmas, and because it was written not as literary art but to sell to the middle class readers whose values and interests it reflected. In any case there were between 100 and 200 epistolary works published and sold in London during the early eighteenth century, many of them very popular, running through many editions. Some of them were collections of separate, unconnected letters, each of which was exemplary, amusing, or informative; some were novels constructed entirely with letters; some were intermediate cases—collections of “real life” letters which were sequential but did not quite tell a story, or novels with interpolated letters but with plots much too complicated to be narrated through the indirection of letters. This cluster of letter fiction provides the seeding for the subsequent development of English novels; close inspection of the form in later chapters will show how the letter format encouraged certain tendencies in fiction, made it possible for women to do such writing professionally, and because of the inevitable assumptions and themes of stories told in letters, made fashionable the tales of endless maneuvering between men and women.

All of the best selling Grub Street hack writers dealt in letters: Defoe, Dunton, Ward, Brown, D'Urfey, and by the 1720s, Eliza Haywood and Mary Manley as well. They translated them, edited them, “presented” them or wrote them outright; many letters were passed off as authentic, some were facetious, some were fictional. Eliza Haywood alone issued eighteen volumes of epistolary work between 1724 and 1727 which means that there was a great demand for them, for her livelihood depended on writing what would sell. Edmund Curll, the most famous, successful, and unscrupulous bookseller of this period was making most of his money by 1719 on letter collections and fictive autobiographies.³³ This was the same bookseller called “unspeakable” by Pope in his denunciation of the whole new upstart literary industry which was upsetting the tradition of literature as an aristocratic occupation. A later critic of the period wrote more kindly of Curll's propensity to print private papers as his “indefatigable industry in preserving our national remains.”³⁴

But not only did the middle class profit from the opening up of the literary profession. Educated women, too, now found it possible to make a living writing stories according to the popular formula, or publishing diaries or letters in a culture which thought it anomalous for a gentlewoman to produce anything more public. Women's writing, of course, was not taken seriously but thought of as a new, pleasant way for women to busy themselves. A reader wrote to The Spectator,

You lately recommended to your Female Readers, the good old custom of their Grandmothers, who used to lay out a great Part of their Time in Needle-work: I entirely agree with you in your Sentiments, … I would, however, humbly offer to your Consideration the Case of the Poetical Ladies; who, though they may be willing to take any Advice given them by the Spectator, yet can't so easily quit their Pen and Ink, as you may imagine.³⁵

The Preface to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Letters, written in 1724 by the first English feminist, Mary Astell, was unusual in its warm praise of the female sensibility. Mary Astell, who had long decried women's servitude, pressing for women's right to a real education, asked her audience to set aside their prejudices against women's writing and be “pleased that a woman triumphs, and proud to follow in her train.”³⁶ The woman she championed, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was one of the few women in the intellectual circles of the day. She was a gifted writer and an astute conversationalist, at one time very much admired by Pope, although later estranged from him. Mary Astell claimed that her letters from Turkey were proof that ladies traveled “to better purpose” than their lords, and that while the public was “surfeited with Male Travels, all in the same tone, and stuft with the same trifles; a lady has the skill to strike out a new path, and to embellish a worn-out subject, with a variety of fresh and elegant entertainment.”³⁷ Certainly Lady Mary traveled “to better purpose” than even elegant entertainment, for it was she who brought back to England the practice of innoculation against small-pox.

Indeed, there were a number of successful woman novelists in the decades preceding the publication of Richardson's Pamela, in spite of the fashionable derision of “Literary Ladies.” Interestingly, all of them—Behn, Manley, Davys, Haywood, Rowe—wrote at least some of their fiction in the form of letters. One of the reasons women were encouraged to try their hands at epistolary fiction was because it was a format that required no formal education. It did not treat traditional literary problems, it necessitated no scholarly training. Its success largely depended on a simple, personal, letter-writing style. This was, in fact, one of the few kinds of writing which had long been encouraged in women since—to make the appropriate distinction—letter-writing had always been thought of as an accomplishment rather than as an art.

But it is important to remember that women did not dominate this new sort of fiction although they wrote a good deal of it. The most authoritative checklist of pre-Richardson epistolary fiction includes seventy-two volumes written by men and fifty-four volumes written by women, of which Eliza Haywood alone wrote twenty-nine.³⁸ It is possible, of course, that women contributed more to epistolary fiction than we can ever know, for sixty-eight of those 200 or so early epistolary works³⁹ have no known authors and it is often thought that respectable women took refuge behind the label “anonymous.”

At the same time that women began to write professionally, they also became a significant new audience for the fiction and light reading coming from the new Grub Street industry. Certainly the proportion of women readers in the audience had been much less half a century earlier. A study of 262 works printed in a ten-year span in the middle of the seventeenth century shows that although twenty-nine were dedicated to specific women, only nine of the books were explicitly intended for a female readership.⁴⁰ Nor had women been the main audience for the romances of the seventeenth century. William Temple recommended several long romances to Dorothy Osborne in the course of their courtship; Samuel Pepys read romances and even tried his amateur's hand at writing one. On January 30, 1664 his diary entry reads:

This evening, being in the humour of making all things even and clear in the world, I tore some old papers; among others, a romance which (under the title of ‘Love a Cheate’) I begun ten years ago at Cambridge; and at this time reading it over tonight I liked it very well. …

But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, a sizable female audience was beginning to be assumed for fiction of all sorts. The preface to Mme. D'Aulnoy's The Present Court of Spain calls attention to its female writer because it “will go a great way you know with the Ladies and admirers of Ladies. …”⁴¹ Edward Ward's Female Policy Detected: or The Arts of a Designing Woman Laid Open (1695) was certainly written because of the growing market for books about women. Dunton, never one to miss a good commercial opportunity, advertised a book of “600 letters pro and con, on all the Disputable Points relating to Women” called The Female Warr. It is interesting that he thought the letter the most believable way of presenting women's voices. Steele, too, considered his treatment of women's topics in The Spectator as new and daring since no other magazine had ever set out to “treat on Matters which relate to Females, as they are concern'd to approach, or fly from the other Sex, or as they are tyed to them by Blood, Interest, or Affection.”⁴² The novelty of his venture is partly visible in the uncertain tone with which he treats women's issues. On the one hand he professed an interest in elevating them to a shared intellectualism with men, deploring the lack of opportunities for women's education and recognizing the harmful effects of the differential attitudes of parents towards their girl and boy children. On the other hand, he patronized, with amusement, the diminished world which women inhabited:

I have often thought there has not been sufficient Pains taken in finding out proper Employments and Diversions for the Fair ones. Their Amusements seem contrived for them rather as they are Women than as they are reasonable Creatures; and are more adapted to the Sex than to the Species. The Toilet is their great Scene of Business, and the right adjusting of their Hair the principal Employment of their Lives … Their most Serious Occupations are Sowing and Embroidery, and their greatest Drudgery the Preparation of Jellies and Sweet-meats.⁴³

The new audience for the incidental prose of letter collections, magazines, and epistolary fiction in the early eighteenth century also continued to include many men. Dudley Ryder for instance, a pleasant middle-class young man whose diary survives, was an avid reader both of letter collections and of essays from The Spectator and The Tatler for their sensible “reflections and observations upon the passions, tempers, follies and vices of mankind.”⁴⁴ One hundred and eighty-six of the 309 names of people engaged to buy a copy of Letters From a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (costing three to five shillings depending on the binding) are men's names;⁴⁵ seventy-four percent of the names on the subscription list bound with the 1730 edition of Some Memoirs of the Amours and Intrigues of a Certain Irish Dean are men's names; 198 out of 332 subscribers for Elizabeth Boyd's The Happy Unfortunate or The Female Page (costing two shillings six pence in advance and an equal sum upon delivery) are men; in five out of six of the subscription lists for epistolary novels reported on by Robert Day, men subscribers outnumber women subscribers two to one.⁴⁶ It would seem that in spite of the increasing number of women's voices and women's issues reaching the public, men were still the main purchasers of literature in that period. Part of the explanation for this, no doubt, is that men tended to control the money in a family. Furthermore, booksellers' shops, like coffee houses, were still men's territory, unusual places for a gentlewoman to be found.

Considering that men still dominated the world of popular literature it is remarkable how many of the central characters in these novels are women. The stories are created so that the reader watches their dilemmas, which are usually sexual, unfold. In the older chivalric romances it had always been a man's honor which was tested, not a woman's—and that honor had altogether different properties from those at issue in the eighteenth-century novel. In the tradition of Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, Aeneas and Dido, it had always been the woman who seductively lured the man from his higher purpose, his noble mission. When Sir Gawain in the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight allowed himself to be seduced by a woman it was a punishable weakness in his knightly character, a flaw in his single-minded perseverance. In the literature of chivalry, a man's honor resided in his physical prowess and his spiritual enlightenment which were his weapons against the forces of evil often tempting him in the form of a sexually inviting woman. By the time of Richardson, these roles had been very much reversed, and without any sense of strain the public read its way tearfully through 2,000 pages of an unscrupulous rake trying to seduce a poor, defenseless woman. As a social philosopher at the turn of the century noted, “Men are now the Tempters, and Women … are first ashamed of their offense.”⁴⁷ No longer were men expected to test their mettle by stoic endurance against tremendous odds—dragons, sorcery, hostile bands of knights. No longer did a man display his “greedy hardiment” by eager combat with challengers. The contest had narrowed considerably by the end of the seventeenth century; a man's trophies were his sexual conquests, and it was the woman who fought the holy struggle to preserve her chastity.

In these fictions, a woman's chastity stood for a more profound inviolability, for being able to hold onto one's convictions and not buckle under pressure. It was her passive endurance, her ability to keep saying “no” in the face of increasingly extreme pressure that was being tested. An early epistolary story by Thomas Brown, for example, shows the connection between chastity and independence; for as long as the husband could not possess his wife sexually he could not “invade” her in any other way either. Only when “the Castle surrender'd” after two months, could the husband control her entirely.⁴⁸

One feels certain that these sexual conflicts were about power rather than desire because the male sexuality is so aggressive. In Crébillon fils' novel Letters from the Marchioness de M*** as in Clarissa, the woman actually dies of the sexual invasion. The military metaphors in Captain Ayloffe's Letters which are standard in the eighteenth-century language of love, are very much to the point; that is, the object of the game was winning as much as pleasure. “Women are like Commanders in small Garrisons,” reads Captain Ayloffe's advice to his friend, “reject the Carte Blanche, and pretend to maintain the last Man; but when your Approaches are made, and the Batteries play smartly upon 'em, they'l hang out the Flag, and that Town is not far from Surrendring, which begins to Parley.”⁴⁹ Or take this letter which a man writes to the woman he loves in Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister. He is telling her of a dream he has just had:

… it was then, and there me thought my Sylvia yielded, with a faint Struggle and a soft Resistance; I heard her broken Sighs, her tender whispering Voice, that trembling cry'd—Oh! Can you be so cruel.—Have you the Heart—Will you undo a Maid because she loves you? Oh! Will you ruin me because you may? My faithless—My unkind—then sigh'd, and yielded, and made me happier than a triumphing God! But this was still a Dream, I wak'd and sigh'd, and found it vanish'd all!⁵⁰

He dreams about “triumphing,” fighting and taking and being deified, potent as a God! Like most of the seduction struggles, this one too is really a power struggle.

One of the reasons for this sexual aggressiveness against women in epistolary novels is because it is precisely the impotent suffering of the embattled heroine which produces the anguished consciousness that needs the release of writing letters. In these stories, women are imprisoned, seduced, abducted, raped, abandoned, and their passively outraged responses to these developments are carefully detailed. Because the woman's role is stereotypically reactive rather than active, the woman's side of things maximizes emotional self-examination. After each encounter, each new plot development, the heroine is given no recourse but to retire to the privacy of her writing closet and react on paper.

Indeed, these epistolary novels are often plotted like experiments performed on isolated individuals. The characters are almost systematically manipulated and their reactions under pressure carefully preserved in their letters or journals. Both Pamela and Clarissa are put through paces to see if they pass the test of virtue. Certainly in a civilization steeped in the Christian tradition of wanderings in the wilderness and of finally finding salvation, stories of trials are no novelty. Yet these references to tests and trials are not so allegorical in tone as they are experimental. One of Aphra Behn's women writes “I'll die before I'll yield my Honour … if I can stand this Temptation, I am Proof against all the World.”⁵¹ “If it had not been for this Trial to get the Mastery of my Passion,” states another embattled heroine in another epistolary novel, “I should never have understood the force of it.”⁵² The books direct the reader's attention to the heroine's responses as she confronts difficulty after difficulty, to be recorded in her letters, as if the emotional particulars of each case are what is important rather than any temporary outcome in the plot.

Perhaps it was because women were so separated from the rest of society, so very much on their own psychologically, that they came to be the symbolic figures who battled for integrity in the new forms of fiction. Even if a woman conformed totally to the expectations her family held for her, she never was really established securely. Her position was so perennially marginal that one misstep could always lose her everything, and she usually had nothing but her own strength of will and character to pull her through. No one in the society was as alone as a woman; she had no personal power, no resources, and if cut off from her parents, no allies. This defenselessness is apparent enough in a Pamela or a Moll Flanders, but a married woman, too, out of favor with her husband, could be as isolated as described in The Fatal Amour Between a Beautiful Lady and a Young Nobleman: “She saw herself in the Hands of an angry Husband, who had an absolute Power over her: And had no body to advise or comfort her.”⁵³ Often these fictional heroines are orphans, lonely individuals standing outside the culture who therefore can be the test cases for working out a new balance between society's regulation and individual desire.

When fictional heroines vacillated about leaving their parental homes and making their own choices, or when fictional rakes debated internally about indulging their desires or following the community's moral codes, they were reflecting dilemmas new to the culture. In part, these were caused by economic changes.⁵⁴ For example, the issue of whether to marry for reasons of estate or for individual preference was a very real question in England at that time. But other problems were metaphorically tested in tales of women's virtue and desire as well: whether or not there were natural moral limits, whether the claims of society and traditional authority ought to come before the needs and passions of an individual.

In the epistolary story by Aphra Behn called Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister (1694), these things come together clearly. It is about an incestuous and adulterous passion which is discussed for a long time in letters before finally being consummated near the end of the story. In his verbal agonies, the hero Philander often writes about what is natural and what is artificially imposed upon man by misguided social codes. He is made to be a spokesman for the more “natural,” animal side of human nature, envying the freedom of wild birds who are not restrained by “troublesome Honour:”

Man, the Lord of all! He to be stinted in the most valuable Joy of Life; Is it not pity? Here is no troublesome Honour, amongst the pretty Inhabitants of the Woods and Streams, fondly to give Laws to Nature, but uncontroul'd they play, and sing, and love; no Parents checking their dear Delights, no Slavish Matrimonial Ties to restrain their nobler Flame. No Spies to interrupt their blest Appointments. …⁵⁵

He questions the social definitions of what is acceptable, and proclaims his right to “incestuous” love. Indeed, when one looks closely at the nobleman and his mistress-sister, Sylvia, it is clear that there are some extenuating circumstances. For one thing, Sylvia is not Philander's actual blood sister but his wife's younger sister, although that relationship still has an incestuous feel to it. For another, his wife is cuckolding him with someone else. But Sylvia argues “False as she is, you are still married to her.”⁵⁶ Because the social codes are taken seriously, the novel is shaped by that struggle over morality.

The characters all realize that there are laws which feeling does not sweep away; throughout there are references to the affair as being “criminal,” “monstrous.” When they are discovered, Sylvia writes to her lover:

Philander, all that I dreaded, all that I fear'd is fallen upon me: I have been arraign'd and convicted; three Judges, severe as the three infernal ones, sate in Condemnation on me, a Father, a Mother and a Sister. …⁵⁷

Her love affair is an illegal one, and she sees in her family's condemnation the disapproval of the larger society. Sylvia's legalistic metaphor foreshadows the real legal action which follows, too, for the larger society does seek to punish the illicit lovers. Philander is pursued by lawsuits for rape and incest. Finally they solve their problem by marrying Sylvia off to one of Philander's lackeys, who agrees to be married in name only, acting as a front for Philander himself. The only way to appease the outraged society is to mimic its conventions, even in travesty.

Although the lovers hide from their parents, and try to outwit the conventions of society, there is no gaiety about this truancy. Throughout this book there is a deep fear of the breakdown of authority. Although Philander decries the social codes, at the same time the reader feels how much they are needed to hold together the society. Vague and shadowy, the execution of Charles I hovers in the background as a warning of where disrespect for law and order can lead. Philander is a political rebel as well as a sexual one; Sylvia denounces his secret revolutionary activities because they could lead to king-killing and sacrilege. She writes to Philander as if there were a mystical and religious sanction against questioning authority: “I am certain that should the most harden'd of your bloody Rebels look him in the Face,” she says, referring to the king, “the devilish Instrument of Death would drop from his sacrilegious Hand, and leave him confounded at the Feet of the Royal forgiving Sufferer …⁵⁸ Certainly this passage is naive; but more than that, it is invested with great religious fervor suddenly and sharply felt. In fact, the energy seems to come from Sylvia's anxiety and displaced sexual intensity, expressed in these political issues. Her exaggerated reaction connects the breaking of the two kinds of rules.

This story of crime, both incest and treason, told in the love letters between Philander and Sylvia, looks much like the same old seduction story. Philander convinces Sylvia, against law and common sense, that their desire for one another is more important than anything else. But closer to the surface than usual, the concerns of a culture in flux can be seen, trying to mediate in its fiction between the claims of the traditional and the individual's questioning of these conventions.

Because the epistolary novel grew in response to certain specific social conditions—a new literary industry, broader literacy in the population, the evolution of the female audience, the development of a few writers among middle and upper class women—it was a form well suited to a detailed working through of moral issues. Characters who spent their fictional lives writing letters to each other about their confusion and ambivalence contributed to an illusion of realism; these emotional outpourings were the literary residue of deeply felt experience and thought from which a reader might learn something of use in order to deal with his own moral dilemmas.

.....

It is not simple coincidence that the novel, and especially the epistolary novel, came into vogue at roughly the same time as women's preoccupations began to have less to do with how they actually lived their lives and more to do with the fantasies of love and romance which were the most they could expect as women, if they kept themselves graceful and attractive. The novel must be understood as a form of literature which developed at a time of dislocating social changes. The growth of cities and the beginnings of industrialism caused new divisions of function in the society on the basis of sex as well as class, and this seriously affected the condition of women in the literate classes. These city women no longer were the economic partners of men, for the new capitalistic modes no longer made public use of their labor, but separated them from the active concerns of life into a pretend world of romantic love and fantasy relationships. It is at this point that the novel came into its own—at a time in history when urban women of the middle and upper classes no longer had any economic power, when they no longer participated in the means of production of the society.

Novels fit into this changing social scene as the means for circulating the comforting affirmation that women were not meant to be grocers or haberdashers or wooldrapers (let alone doctors or scholars), but were intended solely for the business of romantic love. Indeed, if a novel had a male protagonist it could be about almost any sort of subject and circumstance, but if it was about a woman, it was almost certainly about her relation to a man; nothing else was germane. Most of these novels about women start as Thomas Brown's The Adventures of Lindamira (1702) does: “I shall pass over those little Occurances of my life till I arrived to my 16th Year, during which time nothing remarkable hapned [sic] to me,” beginning at the point when the heroine becomes a sexually vulnerable figure, open to the temptations, delusions, and ecstasies of romantic love.⁵⁹

The epistolary novel was the perfect vehicle for stories of romantic love because its very format demanded a subject matter in which emotional states were most prominent. Long distance epistolary involvements, like romantic love, required a taste for sentimentalized fantasy relations, and an ability to shut out humdrum reality. Created to seem possible and true to life, stories in letters portrayed characters who resembled their respectable readers, but who escaped their urban isolation by reading and writing their way into exciting amorous adventures.

Fantasies about love and marriage flourished in this environment not only because they justified the empty lives of middle and upper class women, but because the culture inhibited any realistic and easy relations between the sexes. Marriageable women were rarely alone with the men they imagined themselves to love; such a lack of access could only have encouraged idealized dreams of romance. Many courtships were carried on in letters fuelled by the imaginative process of writing, because written correspondence was the most direct and private way that unmarried men and women had of communicating with one another. We know, for instance, that John Evelyn's eldest daughter Elizabeth appalled her parents by eloping after a longstanding, clandestine correspondence. Dorothy Osborne and William Temple wrote to each other for seven years, despite his father's efforts to find a richer match as well as her relatives' disapproving judgment of William as an adventurer. Finally, after her father died and she survived the smallpox, which disfigured her, they married.

The danger of such relationships was that the distance made it easier to imitate the conventions of the fictions which furnished the ideal versions of such love affairs, and to ignore the obvious disparities between novelistic romances and the experiences of life. The Spectator warned, “We generally make Love in a Stile, and with Sentiments very unfit for ordinary Life: They are half Theatrical, half Romantick. By this Means we raise our Imaginations to what is not to be expected in humane life … because we did not beforehand think of the Creature we were enamoured of as subject to Dishumor, Age, Sickness, Impatience, or Sullennes. …”⁶⁰ As long as such romantic expectations had been attached only to those special relationships outside of the daily round of married life, the stories which promulgated them could have no pernicious effects. But in the fictions of love being written by the end of the seventeenth century, realistic characters were always working through crises, falling in and out of love, managing to live their lives at the emotional pitch which the new clichés about love and marriage celebrated, but which never quite came true for their readers.

The epistolary courtship of Dorothy Osborne and William Temple does not seem to have misled them, for their marriage appears to have been a contented one, despite their early prolonged separation. But other stories from real life did not end so happily. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, enjoyed her courtship with Wortley and arranged to elope with him by letter, because she was forbidden to see him. Her clandestine correspondence, which ended in an unhappy marriage, is very dramatic, even reading like a novel. In fact, when she was an older woman she told her daughter that Richardson's Clarissa reminded her of her own youth. She wrote: “I was such an old Fool as to weep over Clarissa Harlowe like any milkmaid of sixteen over the Ballad of the Ladie's Fall [a broadside written circa 1680]. To say truth, the first volume soften'd me by a near ressemblance of my Maiden Days. …”⁶¹

And it is true—the letters from these “Maiden Days” do read like Clarissa. Lady Mary's parents tried to push her into a loveless marriage to add to the family's wealth, and although she argued and appealed to relatives to intercede for her, she finally had no other recourse but to make a stealthy escape. It was almost forty years before Clarissa when Lady Mary ran off with her lover; at that time most people did not yet consider love either a necessary or a sufficient condition for marrying. Lady Mary, who did not want to marry against her own inclinations, was advised to do so by her relatives, ordered to do so by her father, and considered “a little Romantic” by her friends. She was sure that even her friend Phillipa would think her mad to run away from an arranged marriage.

I give here most of the sequence which Lady Mary remembered so vividly in her later years, both for the sake of showing the degree to which fiction made use of the conditions of women's lives and because such an actual document throws some light on the fiction it resembles.

To Wortley, June 11, 1712:

… My Family is resolv'd to dispose of me where I hate. I have made all the Opposition in my power; perhaps I have carry'd that opposition too far. However it is, things were carry'd to that height, I have been assur'd of never haveing a shilling, except I comply. Since the Time of Mandana's we have heard of no Lady's ran away with, without fortunes.⁶²

To Wortley, July 26, 1712: she tells him that she has written an importunate letter to her father and

… said every thing in this Letter I thought proper to move him, and proffer'd in attonement for not marrying whom he would, never to marry at all. He did not think fit to answer this letter, but sent for me to him. He told me he was very much surpriz'd that I did not depend on his Judgement for my future happynesse, that he knew nothing I had to complain of etc., that he did not doubt I had some other fancy in my head which encourag'd me to this disobedience, but he assur'd me if I refus'd a settlement he has provided for me, he gave me his word, whatever proposalls were made him, he would never so much as enter into a Treaty with any other; that if I founded any hopes upon his death, I should find my selfe mistaken. … I told my Intention to all my nearest Relations; I was surpriz'd at their blameing it to the greatest degree. I was told they were sorry I would ruin my selfe, but if I was so unreasonable they could not blame my F[ather] whatever he inflicted on me. I objected I did not love him. They made answer they found no Necessity of Loveing; if I liv'd well with him, that was all was requir'd of me, and that if I consider'd this Town I should find very few women in love with their Husbands and yet a manny happy. It was in vain to dispute with such prudent people; they look'd upon me as a little Romantic, and I found it impossible to persuade them that liveing in London at Liberty was not the height of happynesse. …⁶³

To Phillipa Mundy, August 1712:

For my part, I know not what I shall do; perhaps at last I shall do something to surprize everybody. Where ever I am, and what ever becomes of me, I am ever yours. Limbo is better than Hell. My Adventures are very odd; I may go into Limbo if I please, but tis accompanny'd with such circumstances, my courage will hardly come up to it, yet perhaps it may. In short I know not what will become of me. You'l think me mad, but I know nothing certain but that I shall not dye an Old Maid, that's positive. …⁶⁴

To Wortley, August 17, 1712:

Every thing I apprehended is come t[o p]asse. ‘Tis with the utmost difficulty [and d]anger I write this. My father is in the house. … I am frighted to death and know not what I say. I had the precaution of desiring Mrs.— to send her servant to wait here for a Letter, yet I am in apprehension of this being stopp'd. If tis, I have yet more to suffer, for I have been forc'd to promise to write no more to you.⁶⁵

To Wortley, August 18, 1712:

… If you can come to the same place any time before that, I may slip out, because they have no suspicion of the morning before a Journey. Tis possible some of the servants will be about the house and see me go off, but when I am once with you, tis no matter.—If this is impracticable, Adieu, I fear for ever.⁶⁶

To Wortley, August 18, 1712:

I would not give my selfe the pain of thinking you have suffer'd as much by this misfortune as I have done. The pain of my mind has very much affected my body. I have been sick ever since, yet tho' overcome by fateigue and misfortune I write to you from the first Inn. …⁶⁷

The similarity of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's experience to those of Richardson's celebrated heroine is startling. It makes the interchange between art and life more tangible: Richardson's art seems more genuinely borrowed from the life of his day, while Lady Mary's letters seem more dramatic than life usually is. The energy in these letters comes not only from her fine independent spirit dealing with difficulties, but also from the theatrical touches in her writing which betray interest in the melodrama of her situation. The way she compares her plight to that of Mandane in the romance by Scudéry, the ironic self-consciousness of writing “Hell” to mean spinsterhood and “Limbo” for an uncertain elopement, and the flamboyance of her declarations give one the impression that she thinks her life comparable to that of a fictional heroine.

The excitement of Lady Mary's courtship with Edward Wortley Montagu must have been heightened by their separation, by their constant brooding about one another, and, of course, by the correspondence that they had to resort to. Their meetings had all the trappings of forbidden adulterous affairs: fear of suspicion, arrangements for passing letters, and for properly spaced meetings in larger gatherings. Their letters are all about missing each other, sudden jealousies, and the designing of future tête-à-têtes. Behind their relationship was the titillation of checking over one's shoulder, of defying parents, of living out a romance—all the elements of an epistolary relationship. The passion with which they invested their relationship was manufactured out of their fantasies about love and about each other rather than growing gradually out of direct experience of the other.

Lady Mary's marriage was evidently not a happy one, and she must have speculated on the degree to which the imaginings of love reckoned in her own youthful folly. Throughout her later letters she reiterates the maxim that passion keeps better in the imagination than in reality, that long possession of any woman inevitably cools a man's desire for her. In the wisdom of age, having lived through her own difficulties, her final response to Richardson's novel was unsympathetic. She wrote to her daughter:

Even that model of Perfection, Clarissa, is so faulty in her behavior as to deserve little Compassion. Any Girl that runs away with a young Fellow without intending to marry him should be carry'd to the Bridewell or Bedlam the next day. Yet the circumstances are so laid as to inspire tenderness, not withstanding the low style and absurd incidents, and I look upon this and Pamela to be two Books that will do more general mischief than the Works of Lord Rochester.⁶⁸

The mischief of which she spoke, no doubt, was the sort that followed from too close identification with such fictional heroines. Novels like Clarissa sowed false expectations of romance in young women, as well as such sympathy for her yearnings as might lead them to share her downfall. While Lord Rochester only wrote lascivious verses whose original impulse was clear and whose effects predictable, Richardson wrote books which lured the reader into a world in which right was not so very distinguishable from wrong, because the verisimilitude of the characterizations roused an empathy in the reader which confused the issues. The epistolary format, especially, created a genre in which each character spoke for him or herself, from his or her own point of view; as Clarissa put it to her friend Anna Howe: “there would hardly be a guilty person in the world, were each suspected or accused person to tell his or her own story and be allowed any degree of credit.”⁶⁹

The trouble was that there was not sufficient ballast in women's lives to keep their feet on the ground. The work they did became progressively more ornamental and less functional in the course of the seventeenth century. Like the heroines of epistolary novels, they merely filled their time while waiting for something exciting to happen. Elizabeth Pepys, for example, the wife of the famous diarist, suffered from having nothing to do while her husband was off with friends or at his office. Samuel Pepys seems to have understood what a strain such interminable inactivity was on his wife, although he could not do much about it:

Up and began our discontent again, and sorely angered my wife, who indeed do live very lonely, but I do perceive that it is want of work. … Then to my office late, and this afternoon my wife in her discontent sent me a letter, which I am in a quandry what to do, whether to read it or not, but I propose not, but to burn it before her face, that I may put a stop to more of this nature. But I must think of some way, either to find her some body to keep her company, or to set her to work and by employment to take up her thoughts and time.⁷⁰

With four or five servants and no children, Elizabeth Pepys had little to do but write complaining letters to her husband, who for his part was always hiring some new maid to keep his wife company, or taking her to visit her mother, or engaging a music teacher or a dancing master to keep her occupied.

The situation was no better for brave Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who wrote this letter to her new husband, describing her occupations in his absence:

I write and read till I can't see, and then I walk; sleep succeeds; thus my whole time is divided. If I was as well qualified in all other ways as I am by idleness, I would publish a daily paper called the Meditator. … Till today I have had no occasion of opening my mouth to speak, since I wished you a good journey. I see nothing, but I think of every thing, and indulge my imagination, which is chiefly employed on you.⁷¹

Nor was her case unusual. The editor of The Tatler claimed he knew twenty families by name “where all the Girls hear of in this Life is, That it is Time to rise and to come to Dinner; as if they were so insignificant as to be wholly provided for when they are fed and cloathed.” With an understanding rare to his time, he continued: “It is with great Indignation that I see such Crowds of the Female World lost to humane Society and condemned to a Laziness, which makes Life pass away with less Relish than in the hardest Labour.”⁷²

Woman's domain had been reduced to her own small nuclear family, for which she was provided with necessities (cloth, food) by professionals in a wage economy which increasingly excluded her. The new cultural emphasis on childhood and childrearing which Philippe Ariès dates from the end of the seventeenth century probably grew out of this social dysfunction. It was then that childhood began to be understood as qualitatively different from adulthood: children stopped being dressed exactly like adults, and painters stopped painting them as scaled-down adults.⁷³ The new consideration given to the education and training of children made motherhood into a kind of profession, creating new responsibilities for women, and providing them with new leverage within the evolving family.

But these were not roles which required formal education and rarely were women trained to read further than the semi-literate assortment of novels, romances, and plays available to them. Even wealthy women were expected to improve their time with needlework rather than in the pursuit of learning. Mary Astell, who petitioned Queen Anne to set up schools for women, felt that this cultural neglect of women's minds was the root symptom of the prejudice against them, and that to it could be traced their characteristic boredom, frivolity, and expense. An intellectual life was the highest good, she believed, and leisure was best filled with serious study and charitable works. She felt that women needed education to help right the balance in their lives, to promote reason over passion, and reality over fantasy. But in advocating women's schools, she could not always keep an ironic note from her writing, for she knew she was demanding it in a social vacuum:

But to what Study shall we apply ourselves? some Men say that Heraldry is a pretty Study for a Woman, for this reason, I suppose, That she may know how to Blazon her Lord and Master's great Atchievements! They allow us Poetry, Plays, and Romances, to Divert us and themselves; and when they would express a particular Esteem for a Woman's Sense, they recommend History; tho' with Submission, History can only serve us for Amusement and a Subject of Discourse. [For] … how will this help our Conduct or excite us in a generous Emulation? since the Men being the Historians, they seldom condescend to record the great and good Actions of Women; and when they take notice of them, 'tis with this wise Remark, That such Women acted above their Sex. By which one must suppose they would have their Readers understand, That they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!⁷⁴

With so little to give their lives meaning and stability, it is no wonder that women were given to illusory brooding about romance. A sophisticated character in a French epistolary novel later in the century shuddered for the susceptibility of idle women whose energies centered on love:

Tremble above all for those women, active in their idleness, whom you call “tender,” of whom love takes possession so easily and with such power; women who feel the need to occupy themselves with it even when they do not enjoy it and who, abandoning themselves unreservedly to the ebullition of their ideas, give birth through them to those sweet letters which are so dangerous to write; women who are not afraid to confide these proofs of their weakness to the person who causes them; imprudent women, who cannot see their future enemy in their present lover.⁷⁵

“Those sweet letters” to which epistolary heroines abandoned themselves, were “dangerous to write” because they fanned the flames of love and encouraged solitary dreaming. Writing kept a woman on the string, imaginatively involved in the love affair, no matter what the distance, no matter what the obstacles. As the famous letter-writing Portuguese Nun observed: “a man should rather fix upon a Mistress in a Convent than anywhere else. For they have nothing there to hinder them from being perpetually Intent upon their Passion. …”⁷⁶

The unreality of women's lives was also perpetuated by such training and direction as they did get. Lord Halifax's famous letter to his daughter, a distillation of the soundest precepts of his time, advised her “to have a perpetual watch upon your Eyes, and to remember, that one careless Glance giveth more advantage than a hundred words not enough considered.”⁷⁷ He warned her to avoid gambling because she might get caught up in the game and forget to compose her face. Everywhere he reminds her that her reputation is her most important possession, in a hostile world where everyone is after her virtue. “The Enemy is abroad and you are sure to be taken if you are found stragling.”⁷⁸ He preached constant vigilance and mastery of inference, of indirect expression, of innuendo. Indeed, his advice could also have been aimed at training for seduction, so much did he emphasize the possible effects of the smallest sign or gesture of real feeling.

Steele satirizes this trained coquetry in the complaints of a fashionable London lady about her visiting country cousin, in The Spectator.

She is very pretty, but you can't imagine how Unformed a Creature it is. She comes to my Hands just as Nature left her, half finished, and without any acquired Improvements. … She knows no Way to express her self but by Tongue, and that always to signifie her Meaning. Her Eyes serve her yet only to see with, and she is utterly a Foreigner to the Language of Looks and Glances. In this I fancy you could help her better than any Body. I have bestowed two Months in teaching her to Sigh when she is not concerned, and to Smile when she is not pleased: and am ashamed to own she makes little or no Improvement. … I could pardon too her Blushing, if she knew how to carry her self in it and if it did not manifestly injure her Complexion.⁷⁹

Although Steele humorously overdoes his thesis that city women are caricatures of all that is unnatural, always playing a part, still he suggests how genteel women of his time did violence to their own feelings of reality. He also describes the upbringing which trained them to control their feelings, expressions, and actions, to ignore discomfort for beauty, and to choose an immediate pain in the expectation of a future pleasure:

When a Girl is safely brought from her Nurse, before she is capable of forming one simple Notion of anything in Life … [she] is taught a fantastical Gravity of Behaviour and is forced to a particular Way of holding her Head, heaving her Breast, and moving with her whole Body; and all this under the Pain of never having a Husband; if she steps, looks, or moves awry. This gives the Young Lady wonderful Workings of Imagination, what is to pass between her and this Husband, that she is every Moment told of, and for whom she seems to be educated.⁸⁰

This is an important point: women were being brought up to live imaginatively in the future; nothing else in their lives justified such training as they got.

By assuming that women were meant primarily for romantic attachment, society condemned them to it. Gone were the earlier straightforward contractual relations between the sexes, supplanted by the mystification of idealized relationships. The only appropriate ambition of a lady of quality was to bend all efforts to the art of pleasing. This constant recourse to the judgments of others was to take the place of living for them and fill the gaps of education and career. “‘Tis much more natural for women to please men than do any other thing,” states a pamphlet published in 1696. “And this desire which is so innate to the Sex, makes them live without action.”⁸¹ Women were instructed to treat themselves as mirrors, to reflect others rather than to have any self. They were to live in their imaginings of others' thoughts rather than in their own reality. “True Love,” began “Mrs. Steele” ominously in the third volume of The Ladies Library, “in all Accidents, looks upon the Person beloved, and observes his countenance, and how he approves or disapproves it, and accordingly looks sad or cheerful.”⁸² Since love was to be the basic inspiration of a married woman's life, she was to experience everything in terms of another's wishes, and filter her life through the construct of her husband's mind.

Not only did this society demand that women move carefully and watchfully through life, guided by their conscious minds and not their instincts, but it denied their physical reality, the enjoyment of their bodies. Their visible constraint was even remarked by a foreign visitor:

Walking is likewise a great Diversion among the Ladies, and their Manner of doing it is one way of knowing their Character; desiring only to be seen, they walk together, for the most part, without speaking: They are always dress'd, and always stiff; they go forward constantly, and nothing can amuse or put them out of their way; I doubt they would not stoop to take up a Flower from under their Feet: I never saw any of them lie on the Grass, not shew the least Inclination to sing. …⁸³

The ultimate physical repression, of course, was the culture's denial of female sexuality. Although trained to attract men, even in a sexual way, the love women were to bear their husbands was to exclude the natural reason that men and women mate. The author of The Present State of Matrimony suggested that women have “an inexpressible Desire of Children, which we rudely, and wrongfully term Lust … This Passion for young Children, is beyond Imagination. The most chaste Virgin in the World can scarce contain herself at the Sight of a beautiful Child; but is ready to devour it with her Kisses.”⁸⁴ Any feeling more distinctly physical than that in a woman was thought degenerate. Many critics have taken Clarissa's vacillations as a sign of her neurosis, but it was characteristic of the period to assume that women only endured sex for money or security. Even Moll Flanders only used sex for these ends. The early novels are filled with heroines who are woodenly unconscious of their own desire—a convention which demonstrated their decency and modesty as well as the expectations of polite society. Defoe, who chides his male readers in Conjugal Lewdness for marrying solely for “Money and Maidenhood,” never admits the possibility of women's marrying for sexual reasons. But he does warn prospective husbands that they would be fools to marry any woman who granted the ultimate favor before the wedding night, because such appetite proved them unfit for marriage.

These attitudes had not always prevailed—even in England. In Chaucer's time, for example, the sexuality of that gat-toothed woman, the libidinous Wife of Bath, was portrayed without embarrassment, ugliness, or shame. Her lustiness was a sign of vitality and readers were to delight in it, to admire her for having had the world in her time. In the Renaissance, too, a woman's sexual appetite was recognized and even feared. For once she was introduced to sexual pleasure by her conjugal duties and her natural passion aroused, one could not depend on her chastity. Husbands were therefore advised to limit sexual activity with their wives, “even to the point of deprecating pleasure,”⁸⁵ and not awaken this dangerous appetite. Certainly the Renaissance conventions of adulterous passion, a system which separated love from marriage, implicitly recognized women's desires. But by the eighteenth century, decent women were no longer expected to enjoy their sexuality. In 1714 a woman, shielded by anonymity, lamented in The Spectator “that Men may boast and glory in those things that we must think of with Shame and Horror!”⁸⁶

The public promotion of contraceptives made this denial all the more double-edged inasmuch as it clarified the distinction between sex for pleasure and sex for reproduction. Although contraceptives had been used in many cultures for centuries, public notice of them was new.⁸⁷ The first mention of them in print came in 1708, in The Charitable Surgeon, by “T. C. Surgeon” (pirated from John Marten) which offered “The certain easy way to escape Infection, tho' never so often accompanying with the most polluted Companion,” and went on to hint that it might keep young ladies from “a great belly.”⁸⁸ A year later The Tatler jogged the public memory by touting him who “invented an Engine for the Prevention of Harms by Love Adventures” as a great “Promoter of Gallantry and Pleasure.”⁸⁹ These notices amounted to a public recognition that sex could be indulged in exclusively for pleasure. Indeed, Defoe frowned upon their use in marriage as encouraging improper attitudes towards sexual relations.⁹⁰

It is important to know these facts about women's lives if one is to make sense of Clarissa's endless ambivalence, Pamela's investment in her simple style of dress, the interminable letters which they wrote, or the reading public's fascination with long stories of women's seduction. The speakers in many early novels were women: Moll Flanders, Roxana, Pamela, Clarissa, Evelina; and their moral, economic, and social choices were symbolized almost exclusively in sexual terms because increasingly, that was the only option in women's lives. Unlike the dazzling but faceless damsels of earlier romances, these self-involved heroines focused minutely and lengthily on their own feelings, for they evolved when their genteel counterparts in life were bored, inactive, badly educated, and without real work. It is no wonder that women's lives furnished the materials for a genre whose subject matter was deferred experience and emotional description.

But the inventors of such heroines had to be careful not to outrage polite readers of their fictions. Their characters had to have the fire and imagination for the ardent love affairs readers wanted to experience by proxy, but enough discretion to inhibit these impulses like properly bred women. The solution was to let art imitate life, and to portray women who enacted in fantasy what they were denied in actuality. One of Mrs. Manley's heroines, for instance, confides to her lover that

Fancy has brought you near, nay so very near, as to my Bosom; there this Morning I dream'd you were, and the Imagination was so strong, that starting out of my Sleep I left my Dream imperfect; my Senses, had their Concern been less, had not so soon rous'd themselves to find whether the Object were a real or imaginary Happiness. And I perhaps had longer seen you, nay, I more than saw you, forgive the Pleasure I take in writing freely. …⁹¹

The unconsciousness of the dream state not only relieved her of responsibility for her sexual desire, but also proved her moral strength. For virtue is cheap if there is no passion to overcome, no struggle to win. Héloise's letters, too, report living through moments from the past she shared with Abelard in a precious, recurring dream:

During the still Night, when my Heart ought to be quiet in the midst of sleep, which suspends the greatest Disturbances, I cannot avoid those Illusions my Heart entertains. I think I am still with my dear Abelard. I see him, I speak to him, and hear him answer. Charmed with each other, we quit our Philosophick studies to entertain ourselves with our Passion. …⁹²

The dream itself is about surrender to passion, the relaxation of vigilant reason, that moment when a woman puts down her book and stops studying. And that is when the remembrance comes to Héloise—when her guard is down, when her fantasies are available to her, unlocked by sleep.

As Eliza Haywood told her readers “whatever Dominion, Honour, and Virtue may have over our waking Thoughts, 'tis certain that they fly from the clos'd Eyes, our Passions then exert their forceful Power, and that which is most Predominant in the Soul, Agitates the fancy, and brings even Things Impossible to pass: Desire, with watchful Diligence repell'd, returns with greater violence in unguarded sleep, and overthrows the vain Efforts of Day.”⁹³ Haywood herself has a delightful example of it in Love in Excess, when during her sleep “Melliora in spite of herself, was often happy in Idea, and possest a Blessing, which shame and Guilt deter'd her from in reality.”⁹⁴ We see Melliora enact in dumbshow, still asleep, the motions of her desire while calling out: “too too lovely Count—Ecstatic Ruiner!” What is all the more delicious, the Count himself is present in the room with her, holding her and kissing her as she sleeps. Melliora can enact her impulsive desires but without any moral responsibility for them because she is asleep. Meanwhile, the chaste reader, too, could have the satisfaction of both admiring an honorable heroine and of vicariously enjoying her less-than-honorable embraces.

Such a scene testifies to the increasing gap in early eighteenth-century culture between private sexual indulgence and public emphasis on chastity; it shows the hypocrisy of an age in which men had the reputations of libertines, while women denied and were denied their sexuality. Nor was the effect of this public prudery to dismiss questions of sex from the public consciousness but rather to focus it more sharply on the mildest of actions. By the time Fanny Burney wrote Evelina, her readership was titillated by the effrontery of a man who took the arm of a decent woman unbidden. Innuendo and metaphor began to make up the deficits in explicit storytelling in these stories of thwarted love: when Melliora stuffs the keyhole to her room to prevent the Count from using his key, there is no doubt about what these images stand for; the nun in Jane Barker's A Patch-work Screen For The Ladies touches off a fire in her convent as she runs away with her lover—the convent and her passion simultaneously burst into flames.

Inevitably, it was feared that such reading would have bad effects on the suggestible minds of young women who were learning to read in greater numbers all the time. Take this warning, for example, the donné of a story by Jane Barker: wealthy Dorinda is so blinded and misled by the romantic fiction with which she has been filling her head that she makes the terrible mistake of marrying her foot-man, sure that he is a prince in disguise. However once he has the legal prerogatives of a husband he proves to be a brute, taking over her property and even pushing her out of the house. She finally blames fiction for the illusions which led her into folly.

It was such Romantick Whimsies that brought upon me the Ruin and Distress in which you behold me; I had read Plays, Novels and Romances; till I began to think myself a Heroine of the first rate; and all Men that flatter'd, or ogled me were Heroes; and that a pretty well-behaved foot-man or Page must needs be the Son of some Lord or great Gentleman.⁹⁵

In Defoe's The Family Instructor (1715), the exemplary dialogue between mother and daughter focuses on this problem as if it were a standard reason for the maternal admonitions of young ladies. At the end of the ideal scenario between mother and daughter, the repentant daughter makes an enormous bonfire of all her plays, romances, and novels, in a blaze of religious fervor. The transgressions of the son in this fictively typical family were profligacy, drinking, play-going, and swearing; no one was concerned about the delicate balance of his mind. Not until fifty years later was there a male character, Rousseau's St. Preux, who was encouraged in his deceptions about romantic love by reading too many novels.

Parents recognized that novels set improper examples and encouraged improper feelings, that the passions in these fictions “are apt to insinuate themselves into unwary Readers, and by an unhappy Inversion a copy shall produce an Original. … Indeed 'tis very difficult to imagine what vast Mischief is done to the World by the False Notions and Images of Things, particularly of Love and Honour, those noblest concerns of Human Life, represented in these Mirrors.”⁹⁶ In fact, epistolary fictions were always calling the attention of readers to these dangers. It was as if they advertised their product and testified for it themselves. In a conversation in Love in Excess, it was averred that “these sort of Books were, as it were, preparations to Love, and by their softening Influence melted the Soul, and made it fit for Amorous Impressions.”⁹⁷ In other words, one was more open to real sexual experience if one had lived through it once already in the imagination.

There is a letter in the fictional collection, The Post-Boy Rob'd of His Mail, in which a libertine instructs a complicitous maid by letter to help him time his amorous attacks:

Watch her softest hours, when her Soul's in tune to join with the Harmony of Love: After her Mind has been employed in Romances, Plays, and Novels, then nought but sweet Ideas fill her Soul, and Love can't be denied admittance, those having so well prepared the way.⁹⁸

He subscribes to the theory that these stories of love will stimulate the woman's sexual impulses and he wants to strike, so to speak, when the iron is hot. In another fiction, an experienced woman writes a letter to a friend, in which she describes seducing a young man by lending him some books. The volume that seemed most effective, significantly enough, is a collection of letters:

We chanced one day to light upon Brown's Translation of Fontenel's and Aristaenetus's Letters; he seem'd mightily pleas'd with 'em; there was one from a Lady who permits a Lover all but the Last Favor, and gives him leave to touch her Breast, to Kiss her Eyes, her Mouth, and squeeze her with her stays off; he could not imagine what Pleasure could be taken in that. …⁹⁹

Certainly the epistolary author is asking the reader-at-home to “imagine what Pleasure could be taken in that,” as well as telling the story. Books do lead one into sexual thoughts. The sequence is reminiscent of Dante's lovers Paolo and Francesca seduced by the kiss in their book. Needless to say, the heroine soon shows the naif what he has been missing. But it is clear that the seeds of his seduction were planted not by any real touching, but by the imagined touching which he experienced through the printed page. This is the point at which the experience of the reader in the fiction is shared exactly by the reader-at-home.

The same seductive technique is employed by the Duke in the Secret Memoirs … from New Atalantis when, attracted to his beautiful young ward Charlot, he decides to stop playing guardian to her virtue and to corrupt her. Like Milton's Satan, he knows that the surest way is to appeal to her imagination, to offer the intangible. He leads her to the library and directs her to read romances and novels and various works which focus on love. Then he leaves for several days, to give the poison a chance to work:

The Duke was an Age absent from her, she could only in Imagination possess what she believed so pleasing. Her Memory was prodigious, she was indefatigable in Reading. The Duke had left Orders she shou'd not be controul'd in any thing: Whole Nights were wasted by her in the Gallery; she had too well inform'd her self of the speculative Joys of Loves. There are Books dangerous to the Community of Mankind; abominable for Virgins, and destructive to Youth; such as explains the Mysteries of Nature, the congregated Pleasures of Venus, the full Delights of mutual Lovers, which rather ought to pass the Fire than the Press.¹⁰⁰

The episodes which follow are predictable. Charlot succumbs to temptation and becomes the Duke's mistress upon his return. Advertising her book as the apotheosis of passion, Mrs. Manley unconsciously burlesques the scene, promising her readers a “young and innocent Charlot, transported with the powerful Emotion of a just kindling Flame, sinking with Delight and Shame upon the Bosom of her Lover in the Gallery of Books.”¹⁰¹ It is a wonderful image, a perfect emblem of the warning and fascination for books which describe love, illustrating how stories about passion induce passion, that vicarious experience enjoyed in the reading could have consequences in real life.

Again and again in epistolary novels, there are scenes which do not advance the plot but seem especially prepared, garnished, and served as inducements to fantasy. Reported in letters, they are twice as suggestive, for they carry with them the motives of the fictive correspondents who want to re-experience their moments of passion by writing about them. Sylvia, for instance, in Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister, writes to her lover:

What tho' I lay extended on my Bed undrest, unapprehensive of my Fate, my Bosom loose and easy of Access, my Garments ready, thin and wantonly put on, as if they would with little Force submit to the fond straying Hand. …¹⁰²

There is no narrative reason for Sylvia to tell Philander all this since both he and his “fond straying Hand” were present at the time. The reader can only understand it as a daydream, a delicious moment Sylvia wants Philander to live through again with her in the imagination. But the passage is also designed to allow the audience a chance to imagine themselves into such a moment. Another letter-writing character, almost as blatant, urges his sister to think of him at the moment he takes his new bride to bed: “I conjure you, Sister, by our Friendship, in your Imagination to time my Joys, when all transported I shall naked clasp her fair, soft, sweet, enchanting Body to my Bosom. …”¹⁰³ Such letters are explicit invitations to the reader-at-home, too, to indulge in voyeuristic fantasy. Imagine, for instance, a solitary reader at home in 1730 reading these words written by a solitary character having an epistolary love affair:

The thoughts of your Return, and our happy Meeting again, fills me with Ideas too ravishing to admit Allay. … Instead of amusing myself with any thing that might make me forget you, I take no Delight but in remembering you: Recollections presenting me with ten thousand nameless Softnesses your dear Society blest me with, and I injoy them over again in Theory. …¹⁰⁴

The unspecific language could fit almost anyone's fantasy of love. And the reader could certainly “injoy them over again in theory” as often and as imaginatively as the epistolary heroine herself.

Even the plot structures of epistolary novels have a sexual rhythm, building towards the moment of sexual release. “I could grow old with waiting here the blessed Moment,” writes Philander in Love-letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, focusing his entire attention, and the reader's as well, on that moment.¹⁰⁵ The characters in epistolary novels stimulate and tease themselves, as well as the reader, with their longings for one another, their jealousies, and the possibilities of their next meeting. The culmination of this epistolary activity is usually their sexual union, the non-verbal end to which the writing is directed. The hindrances to this consummation, the obstacles in the way, then become a kind of titillating foreplay the author and reader engage in. As one of Mrs. Manley's epistolary characters asks, “what can be more exquisite than delay'd Enjoyment?”¹⁰⁶

In Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister, for instance, although we know from the start that Philander and Sylvia are destined for each other, three quarters of Part I goes by before they manage to go to bed together. Until then, most of their writing has to do with the planning and anticipation of that moment. Many pages, written to tantalize and heighten the suspense, elapse after Sylvia agrees to it. And then, after all that, Sylvia faints and Philander becomes impotent; the tryst is a failure and the lovers begin to plan for another one. And so the novel itself becomes a paradigm of sexual play: building up the audience for the big moment, delaying it, and building up again.

The same rhythm is worked out in Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess. Many times before the dénouement, the sexual act is averted at the last minute. The would-be lovers are interrupted at the crucial moment many times and finally even separated by nunnery walls before the actual reunion and marriage take place. There is even one scene in which the Count, about to be seduced by a wealthy, corrupt, alluring woman, is saved at the eleventh hour when a messenger bursts into the room. The scene is unintentionally laughable, for the Count has already come to the brink of intercourse so many times with the lovely Melliora that his near seduction seems like an unintended parody of those scenes: virtue is always being saved just in the nick of time. Not that there is ever any question about the eventual outcome. One of the characters even carries around a wedding gown in a trunk, as Haywood carried the ending in her mind from the start, and makes a dramatic entrance in it at the triple marriage which ends the book.

Interestingly, overt pornography was developing at the same time as these epistolary tales of love and sex. Certainly they came out of the same socio-economic facts: growing literacy and book production, an increased emphasis on women as sexual objects along with greater restraints than ever on their availability, and arrangements for privacy in urban dwellings. This was a context which bred a taste for sexual fantasy, and in it the pornographic novel grew up side by side with the polite novel.

There had always been a place for the bawdy in literature, for the telling of dirty stories for raucous enjoyment. But this new kind of book had a very different effect on its readers. Here is an account which Pepys gives of finding a copy of L'Ecole des Filles unexpectedly:

Jan. 13, 1668

… stopped at Martin's, my bookseller, where I saw the French book which I did think to have had for my wife to translate, called ‘L'escholle des filles,’ but when I come to look at it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book that I ever saw, rather worse than ‘Putana errante,’ so that I was ashamed of reading it.¹⁰⁷

But the fascination outlasted the shame, and a month later Pepys returned to his bookseller's shop and

… bought the idle rogueish book ‘L'escholle des filles,’ which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found.¹⁰⁸

The next day, having read his new book, Pepys says that

it is a mightly lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself of the vilany of the world. … I to my chamber where read through ‘L'escholle des filles,’ a lewd book, but what do no wrong once to read for information sake. … And after I had done it I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame, and so at night to supper and to bed.¹⁰⁹

Pepys's response to the book distinguished it from the bawdy of earlier periods: by 1668 sexuality had the power to entice and to shame. It counted among the villainies of the world, and a reader had to somehow justify his reading such books by claiming for them some redeeming social value.

Both pornography and novels shared an emphasis on the flammable imagination, on the dimension of mental activity in sexual matters. But whereas polite prose fiction emphasized women's sexuality by means of prudish abhorrence of it, by imagining women as protectors of the honor of their families, pornographic books were exclusively about the other side of women's nature. La Puttana Errante (1650) was a discussion between whores on the means to sexual pleasure; L‘Ecole des Filles, published five years later, linked sex to romantic love in a radical departure from conventional mores. By 1660 there was a book out which specialized in perversions, including sections on the young, group intercourse, whipping and lesbianism.¹¹⁰ Women were viewed as angels in one form of prose fiction and as whores in another—in both cases in exclusively sexual terms.

Epistolary fiction, in which characters tried expressly to share their experiences with one another, capitalized on these trends. After all, the purpose of a letter is to make one person's consciousness available to another. Epistolary characters are always trying to make people far away catch fire, to make their friends and lovers feel what they feel. Sometimes this intention is explicit, as with Edward Ward's young man who employs “Loves common confident, The Pen” as a “means of kindling the like Desires in my new found Angel …”¹¹¹ Or there is Mary Davys' gentleman who also thinks a pen the most effective way to woo a lady. “Methinks,” replies this man's intended victim, warning him that she is not susceptible to his sweet words, “you write as if you had a mind to draw me in, as you pretend Love has done you, by Wheedle.”¹¹²

Since all the relationships in an epistolary novel are verbal, people fall in love with one another's words, tempt each other at long distance by writing seductive things, and spy on each other's words. The novels set out to dramatize the relation of imagination to life, the way the words on a page can play havoc with the emotional state of a reader. And because the novel reader is also privy to these very powerful words, he or she is also open to their effects.

Indeed, epistolary fiction often encouraged readers' identification by providing a third figure in the novel who also read the letters, who was privy to the action, and who comprehended the intimacy between the major correspondents. This third person, sometimes a confidante of the hero or heroine, sometimes part of a love triangle, opened up the tale to the reader-at-home by doubling his or her role as spectator to the emotional action.

There is an example of this provocation to voyeurism in The Unnatural Mother and Ungrateful Wife, a story in which daughters triumph over their mothers. It comes in a central scene in which the kindly woman who is being betrayed by her adopted daughter is alerted to this state of affairs by her waiting maid. She watches through a keyhole and sees her husband come into evil Nelly's room at midnight “with nothing on him but his Shirt and a Night-Gown flowing loose about him.” Then the faithless man “threw himself on her Bosom with eager Haste, seem'd ready to stifle her with burning Kisses, while his wanton Hands were preparing to consummate the last guilty Rites of lawless Passion.”¹¹³ As the betrayed wife watches the two lovers enact their passion, the reader notices, with a kind of jealous and guilty shock, that he or she is also watching. The scene, then, is structured to duplicate, for the reader, the voyeurism and to intensify the feelings it engenders.

René Girard, writing theoretically about the novel, describes and explains this “triangulation of desire” as he calls it.¹¹⁴ Triangulating desire, arranging a three-way love interest rather than a simple two-way mutual attraction, keeps the desire from being a simple, direct relation between the one who loves and the object of desire. A triple relationship is mediated by someone else's responses, and this mediation, this awareness of a third person's implication in the love affair intensifies the desire, for the rivals imitate each other, reinforce their own fixations by imagining the other's feeling. In other words, the force of triangular desire comes from the mind, as it were, rather than from the viscera; its power can be attributed to the intensified consciousness which jealousy provokes. Such triangulation is almost standard in epistolary novels, in which letters between lovers or confidantes are always being forged, intercepted, or even just read, legitimately, by a third person.

The experience of vicariously sharing the lives of fictional characters is undoubtedly familiar to long-time novel readers. By now we have all grown up knowing that feeling of becoming absorbed in another world, of escaping through the printed page, of going into that reading trance which substitutes the reality of the world on the page for the world around us; but this is a relatively recent notion of the way literature can function. It was not until the early epistolary novels, with their long-distance relationships, their emotional realism, their stories of amateur writers trying to let one another in on essential experiences, that books were turned to such a use. Until then literature was used to delight and to instruct, but not to confound a storybook realm with real life.

Nor were books the proper medium for light entertainment until literacy and book production put them in the hands of a much larger proportion of the population. Printed literature had always been the province of a small number of educated aristocrats until the late seventeenth century, with traditions going back to the Bible or the classical writers. The issues of these novels—the search for personal happiness in romantic love and marriage, and the sanctification of the individual consciousness (the resistance to seduction or persuasion, the need for privacy)—these had not mattered to earlier cultures. Not until the economic and cultural changes of the seventeenth century, with the consequent reshaping of community and family life, altered social patterns was there need for a literature with another audience, another purpose, another set of strategies.

One of the earliest critics to consider the “origin and progress of novel-writing,” the first editor of Richardson's letters, describes what is special about the way Clarissa works:

We do not come upon unexpected adventures and wonderful recognitions, by quick turns and surprise: we see her fate from afar, as it were through a long avenue, the gradual approach to which, without ever losing sight of the object, has more of simplicity and grandeur than the most cunning labyrinth … As the work advances, the character rises; the distress is deepened; our hearts are torn with pity and indignation; bursts of grief succeed one another, till at length the mind is composed and harmonized with emotions of milder sorrow; we are calmed into resignation, elevated with pious hope, and dismissed glowing with the conscious triumph of virtue.¹¹⁵

Moment by moment the experienced novelist guides us into a world which is familiar and simplified. Gradually he draws us into believing in it, meshes its assumptions with our own, arranges for us to live in his world long enough until it takes over our entire consciousness and “our hearts are torn with pity and indignation” and all the rest of it.

In letter fiction, because writer and reader are already part of the fictional reality, a reader-at-home is that much closer to full suspension of disbelief. Whereas in the epics or tragedies of the Greeks, catharsis was achieved by ritual progress through symbolic action, here it is achieved by identification with the particular plight of a particular individual. We feel the dilemma because we care for Clarissa. The participatory action of reading letters, the attempt to re-create the world of the letter-writer so as to make sense of the letter, encourages this empathy. And for the reading audience of these early novels, used to maintaining emotional connections with family and friends by mail for long periods of time, the effort must have been a familiar one.

Letters have the natural property of suspending attention from the world of objects and turning it inward to imagined people and relationships. These attention-riveting qualities of letters are apparent simply by picking up a modern day letter manual and skimming some samples. The words on the page, with their implication of direct, personal communication, have the power to take precedence over the immediate world. It is not necessary to have a personal connection to the circumstances of these writings to participate in the fictional world from which they arise; one naturally tries to fill in the qualities of the letter-writer and the relationship with the interlocutor from the tone and style of the letter.

These effects influenced the developing novel. A fiction presented “unedited” in a series of letters could lure a reader into putting the story together, into caring about the characters behind the letters. The adventures and relationships of solitary letter-writing characters in fiction were more available to solitary readers at home for delectation and escape than those offered in a more conventional narrative form. Letter novels, like letters themselves, could take you vicariously where you could not go in life.

But this could also be a moral advantage, as Richardson convinced the reading public. One could live through others' mistakes and emerge unscathed but chastened. The experience of an exemplary consciousness—that of a Pamela or a Clarissa—could inspire, uplift, change a reader. “Many a young woman has caught from such works as Clarissa or Cecilia, ideas of delicacy and refinement which were not, perhaps, to be gained in any society she could have access to,” wrote Anna Letitia Barhauld in her early nineteenth-century eulogy of Richardson. In an anecdote included in the introduction to the second edition of Pamela, this sorcery of the novel, this power to take over the reader, is held up as its special advantage:

The first Discovery we made of this Power over so unripe and unfix'd an Attention, was, one Evening, when I was reading her [Pamela's] Reflections at the Pond to some Company. The little rampant Intruder, being kept out by the Extent of the Circle, had crept under my Chair, and was sitting before me, on the Carpet, with his Head almost touching the Book, and his Face bowing down toward the Fire.—He had sat for some time in this Posture, with a Stillnes, that made us conclude him asleep: when, on a sudden, we heard a Succession of heart-heaving Sobs; which while he strove to conceal from our Notice, his little Sides swell'd, as if they wou'd burst, with the throbbing Restraint of his Sorrow. I turn'd his innocent Face, to look toward me; but his Eyes were quite lost, in his Tears. … [He] is perhaps the youngest of Pamela's Converts.¹¹⁶

This passage is a testimonial to the novel's success, proof that it has the desired effect, that it can do its appointed job properly. That stillness which seemed like sleep is a sign of the spellbinding, the transfixion of the boy in another consciousness. The fact that we are told he also “has got half her sayings by heart, talks no other language but hers …” demonstrates, too, the extent to which he has entered Pamela's mind, or perhaps let her enter his. A new era of fiction had begun; now a book was expected to do more than just tell a story.

Letters, by virtue of their place in the culture, their literary effects, and their implicit fiction of a single, personal voice, had been an important link in the process which evolved the modern novel. The experience of long-distance correspondence made it possible for the reading audience to imagine carrying on an emotional life at some remove, or to maintain a one-sided relationship in the imagination rather than to live it out in the social world. This new kind of literature encouraged readers to dream themselves into the lives they found in books, lives of characters for whom reading and writing were their most significant acts.

The epistolary mode also made plausible a new kind of heroine—literate, isolated, unhappy—who symbolized in a purer form the dilemmas of the current culture than the heroes of earlier romances and epics. Such heroines, who poured out their hearts on paper, valued their individual happiness above social approval and assumed that this happiness was to be found not in work or religion but in a perfect sexual union whose institutional form was marriage. These were assumptions which, however widely adopted by middle-class English society, belonged particularly to the women of that class, for the economic and social reorganization which took place in England in the course of the seventeenth century had abridged many of their functions. Novels not only filled the leisure of those without serious work but provided romantic fantasies to give meaning to their lives. Even the intoxication of reading novels resembled the intoxication of romantic love; the epistolary formula, in particular, was a perfect one for stories of romantic love ending in “happily ever after” marriages. In this way, epistolary novels perpetuated the myth of romance in everyday life by telling such stories as if they were true, by giving them wider circulation and making them part of the popular culture, and by inviting readers in their very form, to partake of the pleasures of fantasy.

Notes

1. J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1950), p. 17.

2. W. Maitland, A History of London (London, 1739), pp. 322-324.

3. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1965), pp. 10-11.

4. Philip Pinkus, Grub Street Stripped Bare (New York, 1968), p. 285. This is quoted from a contemporary broadsheet.

5. Margaret Cole, Marriage: Past and Present (London, 1938), p. 86.

6. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1971), I, 254.

7. David Owen, English Philanthropy (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. 53.

8. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, p. 25. See the work of early demographers such as John Graunt and William Petty or the pamphlet Marriage Promoted: In a Discourse of Its Ancient and Modern Practice both under Heathen and Christian Commonwealth (London, 1690), described below.

9. William Black, Observations Medical and Political on the Small Pox and the Mortality of Mankind at Every Age in City and Country (London, 1781), p. 154.

10. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. Koelln and James Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951), p. 47.

11. Marjorie Nicolson and Nora Mohler, “The Scientific Background of Swift's Voyage to Laputa,” Annals of Science, 1937, II, 299-334. See especially pp. 322-323.

12. César de Saussure, Lettres et Voyages (Laussane, 1903), Lettre VI, pp. 166-167.

13. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, I, p. 92.

14. William M. McBurney, A Checklist of Prose Fiction, 1700-1739 (Cambridge, 1960), p. viii.

15. E. S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn (London, 1959), p. 689. Entry dated August 27, 1680.

16. Ibid., p. 1027.

17. These newsletters were like the European relations or reports of topical events. See Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620-1660 (Cambridge, 1961).

18. For Ward's sensational “letters” describing the pleasure-seekers of Tunbridge or the wicked colonists of New England, see Edward Ward, “A Packet from Will's” in Letters of Love, Gallantry, and Several Other Occasions, 2 vols., by Voiture, Brown, Dryden, Congreve, etc. (London, 1724) II; also A Trip to New England (London, 1699). This and “A Letter From New England” are reprinted by the Club for Colonial Reprints, ed. George Parker Winship (Providence, 1905).

19. John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739 (Oxford, 1969), p. 77.

20. Ibid., p. 77.

21. Philip Pinkus, Grub Street Stripped Bare, p. 92.

22. Eliza Haywood, The Agreeable Caledonian (London, 1728), p. 84.

23. Thomas Salmon, A Critical Essay Concerning Marriage (London, 1724), p. 165.

24. Eliza Haywood, “Good Out of Evil; or, The Double Deceit” appearing in Eliza Haywood, Love in Its Variety; Being a Collection of Select Novels written in Spanish by Signior Michael Bandello (London, 1727), p. 67.

25. Mary Delariviere Manley, The Secret History of Queen Zarah (London, 1705), Preface.

26. Ibid., Preface.

27. A Spy Upon the Conjurer, author uncertain, possibly Daniel Defoe or Eliza Haywood (London, 1724), Part III.

28. Eliza Haywood, The Disguis'd Prince or, The Beautiful Parisian (London, 1728), pp. 1-2. This is a translation of a French book written in 1679 by Jean de Préchac.

29. Pierre Corlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, The Life of Marianne (London, 1736), Part II, 83-84.

30. Robert Adams Day, Told in Letters (Ann Arbor, 1966), p. 71.

31. A. S. Collins, ‘The Growth of the Reading Public During the Eighteenth Century,” Review of English Studies, II(1926), 284-294.

32. Mary Davys, “Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady,” in The Works of Mrs. Davys, 2 vols. (London, 1725), II. Also available in publications of Augustan Reprint Society, #54, 1955.

33. William Henry Irving, The Providence of Wit in The English Letter-Writers (Durham, 1955), p. 145.

34. David Nichols, The Correspondence of Dean Atterbury, 5 vols. (London, 1783-1790), I, iv.

35. The Spectator, No. 632, Dublin, Nov. 30, 1714.

36. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1965), I, Appendix I, 467.

37. Ibid., p. 467.

38. Robert Day, Told in Letters, pp. 239-258.

39. This is Day's figure. Actually there were somewhat fewer for some of the works on his bibliography are duplicates: the same book reprinted later with a new title page, or individual pieces of a collection listed individually and also together.

40. An unpublished Radcliffe thesis by Ruth Stauffer in 1942.

41. Mme. D'Aulnoy, The Present Court of Spain, trans. Thomas Brown (London, 1693), Preface.

42. The Spectator, No. 4, March 5, 1711.

43. The Spectator, No. 10, March 12, 1711.

44. The Diary of Dudley Ryder (1715-1716) ed. William Matthews (London, 1939), p. 119. Entry dated October 14, 1715.

45. George Frisbie Whicher, The Life and Romances of Eliza Haywood (New York, 1915), p. 11.

46. Robert Day, Told in Letters, p. 74.

47. Marriage Promoted: In a Discourse of Its Ancient and Modern Practice both under Heathen and Christian Commonwealth, anonymous pamphlet (London, 1690), p. 27.

48. The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, 2 vols. (London, 1707), I, 337-340.

49. “Captain Ayloffe's Letters,” in Abel Boyer's Letters of Wit, Politics, and Morality (London, 1701), reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, The Novel in Letters (Coral Gables, 1969), p. 27.

50. Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister (London, 1694), Part I reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, The Novel in Letters, p. 206.

51. Ibid., p. 217.

52. Five Love-letters From a Nun to a Cavalier, trans. Sir Roger L'Estrange (London, 1678), reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, The Novel in Letters, p. 17.

53. Anonymous, The Fatal Amour Between a Beautiful Lady and a Young Nobleman (London, 1719), p. 64.

54. Chapter 2, passim.

55. Reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, The Novel in Letters, p. 221.

56. Ibid., p. 215.

57. Ibid., p. 265.

58. Ibid., p. 225.

59. The Adventures of Lindamira, Revised and Corrected by Mr. Thomas Brown (London, 1702), p. 2.

60. The Spectator, No. 479, September 9, 1712.

61. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1965), III, 8-9. Letter to Lady Bute, March 1, 1752.

62. Ibid., I, 123n. Mandane is the runaway heroine of Madelaine de Scudéry's Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1649-1653), which Lady Mary read as early as 1705.

63. Ibid., I, 133-134.

64. Ibid., I, 149-150. The exact date of this letter is unknown. Phillipa Mundy was a close friend of Lady Mary's age: she was Lady Mary's “Anna Howe.”

65. Ibid., I, 163-164. In the heat of this excitement, Lady Mary was writing Wortley twice a day: two letters on August 15, two letters on August 16, and an earlier one on August 17 precede this letter. Weary students of epistolary fiction should take note that people did write an extraordinary number of letters.

66. Ibid., I, 164.

67. Ibid., I, 164.

68. Ibid., III, 9. Letter to Lady Bute, March 1, 1752.

69. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, 4 vols. (London, 1748), I, 186.

70. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 2 vols. (New York, 1893), I, 513-514. Entry dated November 13, 1662.

71. The complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, I, 175. Letter to Wortley, December 8, 1712.

72. The Tatler, No. 248, November 8, 1710.

73. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962) pp. 349-350 and passim. Lawrence Stone disagrees about the evidence of children's dress styles, but generally supports Ariès' conclusions that England was moving towards a more child-oriented society. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage (New York, 1977), pp. 405-449.

74. Mary Astell, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England (London, 1705), pp. 292-293.

75. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses. trans. Richard Addington (New York, 1962), p. 178.

76. Five Love-Letters From a Nun to a Cavalier, trans. Roger L'Estrange (London, 1678), reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, The Novel in Letters, p. 19.

77. “The Lady's New Year Gift, or Advice to a Daughter,” The Life and Letters of Sir George Saville, Bart. First Marquis of Halifax, 2 vols. ed. H. C. Foxcroft (London, 1898), II, 410.

78. Ibid., II, 408.

79. The Spectator, No. 66, May 16, 1711.

80. Ibid.

81. Anonymous [possibly Judith Drake], A Farther Essay Relating to the Female Sex (London, 1696), p. 59.

82. Anonymous [possibly Mrs. Steele], The Ladies Library, 3 vols. (London, 1714), III, 90.

83. Béat de Muralt, Letters Describing the Character and Customs of the English and French Nations (London, 1726), p. 35.

84. Philogamous, The Present State of Matrimony (London, 1739), p. 67.

85. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, 1965), p. 105.

86. The Spectator, No. 611, October 24, 1714.

87. Peter Laslett dates the use of contraceptive devices to Geneva at the end of the seventeenth century. The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965), p. 132.

88. T. C. Surgeon, The Charitable Surgeon (London, 1708), p. 58.

89. The Tatler, No. 15, May 13, 1709.

90. Daniel Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness (London, 1727), p. 132.

91. Mary Delariviere Manley, Court Intrigues (London, 1711), p. 138.

92. The Letters of Abelard and Héloise, trans. John Hughes (London, 1743), p. 185.

93. Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (London, 1719), Part II, 47.

94. Ibid.

95. Jane Barker, The Lining to the Patch-work Screen (London, 1726), p. 106.

96. Anonymous [possibly Mrs. Steele], The Ladies Library, II, 46.

97. Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, p. 36.

98. Charles Gildon, The Post-Boy Rob'd of His Mail (London, 1692), p. 237.

99. Mary Delariviere Manley, “From a Lady To a Lady,” Letter XXXIII in Court Intrigues (London, 1711), reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, The Novel in Letters, p. 44.

100. Mary Delariviere Manley, Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes From New Atalantis (London, 1709), p. 67.

101. Mary Delariviere Manley, Rivella, p. 4, bound with Court Intrigues (London, 1711).

102. Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister (London, 1694), reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, The Novel in Letters, p. 246.

103. Mary Delariviere Manley, Court Intrigues, p. 36.

104. Eliza Haywood, Love-Letters on All Occasions (London, 1730), p. 103.

105. Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between A Nobleman and His Sister, reprinted in Natascha Würzbach, The Novel in Letters, p. 230.

106. Mary Delariviere Manley, Court Intrigues, p. 36.

107. The Dairy of Samuel Pepys, II, 768-769. Entry dated January 13, 1668.

108. Ibid., II, 790. Entry dated February 8, 1668.

109. Ibid., II, 790.

110. David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745 (New York, 1965) p. 48.

111. “The Dancing School,” A Collection of the Writings of Mr. Edward Ward, 6 vols. (London, 1717-1718), II, 237.

112. Mary Davys, “Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady”, The Works of Mrs. Davys, 2 vols. (London, 1725), II, 299.

113. Anonymous, The Unnatural Mother and Ungrateful Wife (London, 1730), p. 11.

114. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore, 1965), Chapter 1.

115. Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Richardson,” The British Novelists, 50 vols. (London, 1810), I, xiv. Barbauld, besides being a great admirer of Richardson's technique, was the first editor of his letters.

116. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 2nd edition (London, 1741), Introduction, pp. xxiv-xxv.