Finding herself at Quebec in 1763, Frances Brooke (1723-1789) made the most of the opportunity to transmute some of her experiences and observations into fiction. The result, The History of Emily Montague (1769), is well known in Canada. Yet criticism of this work has rarely, and then only briefly, alluded to Brooke's earlier writing which prepared her to make such effective use of her Canadian experiences.¹ Her earlier novel, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763) was, in fact, more popular in its day than Emily Montague and deserves consideration in its own right.² Also ignored has been a consideration of influences on Mrs. Brooke's writing, with the one exception of Samuel Richardson, father of all eighteenth-century epistolary novelists. A study of Mrs. Brooke's translation of Madame Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby t Milady Henriette Campley, son Amie (1759) provides us with an indication of another influence at least as important as that of Richardson, that of Madame Riccoboni and the French novel of sensibility. Emily Montague then can be seen as a natural development in style, attitude, tone, and characterization, from Frances Brooke's earlier work, her own novel, and her translation from the French.

Sensibility was not English in origin. The main stream of sensibility novelists who influenced writers throughout Europe were French. As Maurice Levy has noted, "France before England devoted itself to the problems of the heart and the passions."³ Madame de la Fayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678), with its portrayal of love as an overwhelming passion which brings suffering and joy, despair and ecstasy, had provided the early impetus, and Pierre Marivaux with La Vie de Marianne (1731-1736) is considered the founder of the French school of sensibility. Abbe Prevost's Memoires et aventures d 'un homme de qualite qui s 'est retire du monde (1728-1733), especially the last volume, Manon Lescaut (1733), which appeared in many editions in both French and English, influenced writers of both countries. E. A. Baker quotes from Manon Lescaut: "If tears and sighs are not to be described as pleasures, it is true nevertheless that they have infinite sweetness for a person in mortal affliction. The moments that I devoted to my grief were so dear to me that to prolong them I abstained from sleep."⁴ These lines could have appeared in any one of a number of subsequent eighteenth-century novels of sensibility, English or French.

At the time of Mrs. Brooke's translation of her novels, Madame Marie Jeanne Riccoboni (1714-1792) was becoming well known in both France and England for her novels of sensibility. Appearing only one year after the original French novel, with a second edition the same year and six editions by 1780, Mrs. Brooke's translation furthered Madame Riccoboni's popularity and was an impetus to the developing cult of sensibility in England. Madame Riccoboni explored especially the intense feelings evoked by love. Sorrow was always a necessary element, and her plots were constructed around heroines either betrayed or believing themselves betrayed. Although the way of life she described was generally realistic she tended to avoid reference to the mundane aspects of reality, and to unhappiness and tragedy except for that "sweet melancholy," in which the sentimental reader took pleasure and which demonstrated the excessive sensibility of her hero and heroine. As Francis Wright remarks, "In constructing a plot to develop sorrow, either transient or permanent, she sketched the prototype of the sentimental love story."⁵

When Frances Brooke translated Madame Riccoboni's Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby a Milady Henriette Campley, son Amie in 1760, she selected one of the best novel⁶ of a woman already widely known, and presumably a novel which she, herself, found congenial. The Letters of Juliet Lady Catesby to her Friend, Lady Henrietta Campley⁷ is typical of Madame Riccoboni's works. The tone of the novel is highly emotional, voicing the increasingly distraught state of mind of the central character, Juliet Catesby, and her lover, Lord Ossory. As is usual with Madame Riccoboni, the plot revolves around the various complications which must be resolved before the two lovers are finally united. The novel is composed of thirty-nine letters from Juliet Catesby to her friend, Henrietta. At the onset the reader learns of Lady Catesby's hasty departure from the house she had been visiting to avoid encountering her former lover, Lord Ossory. She gives a lengthy and highly emotional account of her meeting several years earlier with Ossory, their love and decision to marry, his abrupt departure after a highly emotional but inexplicable scene, and his hasty marriage to another. His wife has died and now he is besieging Juliet with letters. After much emotional wavering, she finally consents to read Ossory's lengthy explanation of his earlier conduct. He confesses that, in a state of drunkenness following a party, he had seduced the young sister of a close friend and, learning later of her pregnancy and threatened suicide, felt obliged to marry her. Now, two years later, she is dead and he is free to reveal the story to Juliet. Satisfied with Ossory's explanation Juliet agrees to marry him.

From this novel Mrs. Brooke learned how to construct a tightly knit novel of sensibility. Her History of Lady Julia Mandeville,⁸ which appeared three years after this translation, is composed of seventy-seven letters, the great majority of which are written by two central characters: Harry Mandeville, the lover of Julia, and Lady Anne Wilmot, a spritely, coquettish young widow, friend of the two lovers. Anne's letters to her own lover Colonel Bellville recount activities on the country estate of Julia Mandeville's father, Lord Belmont, where she and Harry are guests. Harry's letter to a friend, George Mordaunt, are occupied primarily with his description of his growing love for Julia. When he realizes the intensity of his love, Harry resolves to leave the Belmont estate in the hope of increasing his fortune sufficiently to marry her. Before he leaves, Harry and Julia vow to remain true to their love, but they acquaint neither Julia's parents nor Harry's father with the situation. Not long after, through a complicated set of circumstances, Harry is led to believe that Julia will marry Lord Melvin, son of a wealthy aristocratic friend of her family. He rushes to Belmont where he is critically injured by Melvin whom he has forced into a duel. Harry lives long enough to learn that the wedding plans of which he heard were intended for his own marriage to Julia and that he was to inherit the Belmont title and estate. Through chance Harry had never received the letter acquainting him with this happy resolution. Shortly after his death Julia dies of a broken heart.

The theme of noble and sentimental lovers exhibiting the utmost sensibility as they seek to resolve their difficulties is common to both novels and given full expression in both. Madame Riccoboni's lovers are finally happily united, although this is not the case in all of her novels.⁹ Mrs. Brooke's Julia and Harry Mandeville die for love; however, there are two central pairs or lovers whose situations are happily resolved after various impediments are overcome: Anne Wilmot and Bellville; Anne's niece, Bell Hastings, and Lord Melvin. Bell's dilemma resembles that of Juliet Catesby; it is the result of an apparent betrayal, but as with Lady Catesby all is eventually explained satisfactorily.

In both novels the sensibility of the lovers is frequently demonstrated and as frequently referred to. Juliet Catesby gives an indication of the acute sensibility of herself and her lover as she recounts the moment when she and Ossory first revealed their love to each other: "One day, reading an affective Story of two tender Lovers who had been cruelly torn from each other, the Book fell from our Hands, our Tears began to flow …" (Letter XV). This scene not only demonstrates their tenderness in weeping for fictional lovers, but also foreshadows their own separation and provides an indication of the intensity of their emotions when such would occur. The emotional stress resulting from leaving Juliet to marry the woman he seduced does, in fact, cause Ossory to become seriously ill. Juliet Catesby's present suitor, Lord Harry, also shows his sensibility by collapsing when rejected. This in turn leads Juliet to exclaim, despite her dislike for him, that her heart is "too full of sensibility not to compassionate his Love, though too much prepossessed to return it" (Letter XXIII). In Mrs. Brooke's novel, Harry Mandeville, too, is beseiged by an unwanted suitor, a Miss Westbrook, daughter of a nouveau riche neighbour, and as he journeys forth to inform her that he cannot respond to her overtures his reaction to the situation is much like that of Juliet: "These trials are too great for a heart like mine, tender, sympathetic, compassionate, and softened by the sense of its own sufferings; I shall expire with regret and confusion at her sight." Harry's excessive sensibility is the major theme of his letters. He is the male counterpart of Riccoboni's Juliet Catesby. It is Harry who writes of the ennobling quality of love: "Why do closeted moralists, strangers to the human heart, rail indiscriminately at love? When inspired by a worthy object, it leads to everything that is great and noble; warmed by the desire of being approved by her, there is nothing I would not attempt"; and later, "The love of such a woman is the love of virtue itself: it raises, it refines, it ennobles every sentiment of the heart." Julia, too, in the Brooke novel, writes to her friend Emily Howard of her own sensibility, "Born with a too tender heart, which never before found an object worthy of its attachment, the excess of my affection is unspeakable. Delicate in my choice, even in friends, it was not easy to find a lover equal to that idea of perfection my imagination had formed."

Throughout Madame Riccoboni's novel we are immersed in the sufferings, the "exquisite pangs," of the separated lovers. It is only in the last section of Mrs. Brooke's novel, however, that we are plunged into the grief of the dying lovers and the anguish of their afflicted parents and friends. After the death of the two young lovers, Anne Wilmot writes: "Pleased with the tender sorrow which possessed my soul, I determined to indulge it to the utmost," words reminiscent of those of Prevost's Man of Quality quoted earlier: "If tears and sighs are not to be described as pleasures, it is true nevertheless that they have sweetness for a person in mortal affliction. The moments that I devoted to my grief were so dear to me that to prolong them I abstained from sleep." There is a genuine pleasure in sorrow for the individual of sensibility. The previously Edenic setting of the Belmont garden takes on gothic overtones as Anne writes:

Pleased with the tender sorrow which possessed all my soul, I determined to indulge it to the utmost; and, revolving in my imagination the happy hours of chearful friendship to which that smiling scene had been witness, prolonged my walk till evening had, almost unperceived, spread its gloomy horrors round; till the varied tints of the flowers were lost in the deepening shades of night.

Awaking at once from the reverie in which I had been plunged, I found myself at a distance from the house, just entering the little wood so loved by my charming friend; the every moment increasing darkness gave an awful gloom to the trees; I stopped, I looked round, not a human form was in sight; I listened, and heard not a sound but the trembling of some poplars in the wood; I called, but the echo of my own voice was the only answer I received; a dreary silence reigned around; a terror I never felt before seized me; my heart panted with timid apprehension; I breathed short, I started at every leaf that moved; my limbs were covered with a cold dew; I fancied I saw a thousand airy forms flit around me; I seemed to hear the shrieks of the dead and dying; there is no describing my horrors.

It is worth noting that Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto was published the same year as The History of Lady Julia Mandeville, 1763. The melodramatic climax, the sudden violence, and the overtones of the final pages of Mrs. Brooke's novel differentiate her from Madame Riccoboni and indicate her awareness of the trend of the novel of sensibility toward the gothic.

Eighteenth-century readers apparently objected to the disastrous ending of Mrs. Brooke's novel. According to one report, "It has been often, however, wished that the catastrophe had been less melancholy; and of the propriety of this opinion the Authoress herself is said to have been satisfied, but did not choose to make the alteration."'¹⁰ Mrs. Brooke was living in the age that preferred Nahum Tate's King Lear (in which the ending had been altered to suit the tender sensibilities of the audience) to Shakespeare's tragedy. Having criticized the influential David Garrick in The Old Maid for preferring the "adulterated cup of Tate [Nahum Tate's Lear] to the pure genuine draught offered him by the master he avows to serve with such fervency of devotion,""¹¹ Mrs. Brooke is not the writer to alter the unhappy ending of her novel to placate her readers.¹²

Although the catastrophe has come about abruptly, for the reader a brief reference to Romeo and Juliet foreshadows the tragedy. Writing of this play Anne says:

We have seen them enact Romeo and Juliet.

Lady Julia seemed to sympathize with the heroine:

I'll not wed Paris; Romeo is my husband.

Indeed the similarity to Romeo and Juliet is not to be overlooked. At nineteen Julia is as innocent and naive a heroine as Juliet. She remains true to her lover from whom she is separated because of anticipated, rather than actual, parental opposition to their marriage. Harry rushes back because of a supposed plan of her father to marry her to another suitor. Like Romeo he dies because he fails to receive the letter which would clarify the situation. The parents who failed to explain their plans to their children ultimately must bear a large share of the responsibility for the tragedy. As in Romeo and Juliet each has lost an only child, and, as the novel ends, each plans to erect a memorial monument.

Although a duel provides the climax to the novel, duelling is only one of the aspects of society on which Mrs. Brooke is commenting. It is not intended to have the prominence which Mrs. Laetitia Barbauld in 1810 ascribes to it when she speaks of The History of Lady Julia Mandeville as "a forcible appeal to the feelings against the savage practice of duelling."'¹³ Duelling also appears in Mme. Riccoboni's novel as an aspect of life which contributes to both Juliet's anguish and Ossory's dilemma. Juliet learns of the death of her only brother in a duel at the moment when she is most distressed by her apparent betrayal, and Ossory's unhappy situation is increased when he realizes that, were he not to marry the woman he seduced, her brother must surely challenge him to a duel; in all likelihood he would then add his friend's death to the woman's disgrace in the list of his culpabilities.

Didacticism and sentimentality characteristic of the novel of sensibility are very much in evidence in both of these novels. Yet the wit and humour which provide much of the attractiveness of the later History of Emily Montague are equally a part of Mrs. Brooke's first novel. In this respect she runs counter to the traditional novel of sensibility in which the excessively sentimental characters dominated by their emotions are more prone to tears than to laughter, and to emotional outbursts than to wit. Here certainly she differs radically from Madame Riccoboni, with whose heroine we are inclined to agree when she says about two-thirds through the novel:

A Reflexion strikes me, my Dear; it is that I certainly must weary you. I tell you my Thoughts as they rise, and Heaven knows they contain nothing amusing—.

(Letter XV)

Yet Lady Juliet Catesby, who never oversteps the bounds of propriety but remains a conventional heroine in outward behavior, makes a number of remarks which indicate her antipathy to the restrictions on women at the time and to the double standard governing the conduct of men and women. When her friend Henrietta's fiance suggests that she should forgive Ossory since he is now repentant, Juliet seizes the opportunity to express her indignation at this male attitude:

My Lord Castle-Cary pretends, that all Resentment ought to yield to a sincere Repentance. With my Inferiors, I will govern myself by this Maxim; but never with my Friends. But, my Dear, it will not be useless to make a little Remark here. It is, that Man only establish this Principle, in Hopes to take Advantage of it; Accustom yourself to think, with my Lord Castle-Cary, that Repentance effaces all Faults, and depend on it, he will provide himself of sufficient Occasions to repent.—His Letter displeases me, I confess: I renounce his Approbation: It would cost me too dear, if I must buy it by a Weakness, which would degrade me in my own Eyes.

(Letter VII)

Later she writes:

O my dear Henrietta, the Men regard us merely as Beings placed in the Universe for their Amusement; to trifle with, in that Species of Infancy, to which they are reduced by those impetuous Passions, which they reserve to themselves the infamous Liberty of arousing with Confidence, and submitting to with Shame. They have left to that Sex they presume to typify as weak and irresolute, the difficult Task of resisting the softer Impulses of the Heart, of conquering Nature herself. Slaves to their Senses alone, when they appear to be so to our Charms; it is for themselves they pursue, for themselves they address us: They consider only the Pleasures we are capable of bestowing: They withhold their Esteem from the object of their pretended Adorations; and if they find in us Strength of Mind, and Dignity of Sentiments, we are inhuman Creatures: We pass the Limits their Tyranny has prescribed to us, and become unjust without knowing it.

(Letter XXII)

Possibly such feminist comments made the novel more congenial to Mrs. Brooke to translate; certainly they would reinforce her own feminist stance.

In Mrs. Brooke's novel, Julia Mandeville is, like Juliet Catesby, the conventional eighteenth-century heroine, but she plays a minor role in the novel which bears her name. The more prominent Anne Wilmot is the Brooke spokesman. While Riccoboni's Juliet Catesby rails against the injustices of the woman's situation in society, Brooke's Anne has learned to cope with the situation in which she finds herself in the eighteenth-century battle of the sexes, as these words suggest:

I am too good a politician in love matters ever to put a man out of doubt till half an hour before the ceremony. The moment a woman is weak enough to promise, she sets the heart of her lover at rest; the chace, and of consequence the pleasure, is at an end; and he has nothing to do but to seek a new object; and begin the pursuit over again.

The feminism which is evident in The History of Emily Montague is evident in the earlier Brooke novel through the persona of Anne who provides the humour as well as adding an air of realism to The History of Lady Julia Mandeville. One would expect such a lively character as Anne from the pen of Frances Brooke, whose highly successful Old Maid was the first periodical initiated by a woman,'¹⁴ and who was not afraid to cross swords with the powerful David Garrick, criticizing him in The Old Maid and later satirizing him in her novel The Excursion (1777).¹⁵ Anne enjoys the new-found freedom of widowhood and, as almost half the letters of the novel are written by her, considerably livens up proceedings, providing an effective contrast to the emotional outpourings of Harry Mandeville. She is both of her age and outside of it. More than anyone else she is guided by right reason as well as elegant manners. As a friend of the young lovers whose own romance remains for the most part in the background she is in role and personality the forerunner of Emily Montague's young friend, Arabella Fermor. Anne is not a sentimentalist to the extent that Harry and Julia are, but rather practical and realistic. At one point, for example, she suggests that Harry should seriously consider marrying Miss Westbrook solely for her money. It is she who realizes the impracticality of Harry's plan to increase his fortune sufficiently in a year to marry Julia. Aware of the world she lives in, she assumes that Belmont would never consider the relatively fortuneless Harry for Julia despite his aristocratic name, elegant manners and excessive sensibility. In this assumption, however, she is wrong; benevolence wins over practicality with Belmont.

Anne is adroit at manipulating people and situations, a talent charmingly evinced when seemingly chance events at a ball produce happy results for Julia and Harry and unhappy for Miss Westbrook. We learn later that Anne has carefully plotted the whole incident, making full use of her understanding of human nature and her skills as a coquette.¹⁶ Her practical nature is demonstrated by the solution she works out to evade the clause in her husband's will whereby the entire estate passes immediately to his niece, Bell Hastings, if she marries. She wins Bell's agreement to return half the estate to her on her marriage, for if Bell did not agree to this Anne would not marry and the young woman would receive no share of the estate. As Anne points out, the half she herself will receive is in fact the sum of her dowry which, once passed to her husband, is lost to her completely—another comment on woman's status in eighteenth-century society. Perhaps the best example of Anne's flouting of eighteenth-century convention, when it cannot be manipulated or avoided, is her admission to Lady Belmont, after some witty and elusive repartee, that she does, in fact, love Bellville and that, since marriage appears impossible for them, she intends to continue enjoying his company, despite the impropriety of such a relationship in the eyes of society.

Similarities between The History of Lady Julia Mandeville and the better known History of Emily Montague are immediately evident. Both are epistolary novels structured about three sets of lovers. In both, the majority of letters are written by the man involved in the central romance, a conventional eighteenth-century lover (Harry Mandeville and Ed Rivers) and by the woman participant in a secondary romance (Anne Wilmot and Arabella Fermor). In both novels the woman is the astute observer and commentator on the affairs of the other lovers. In both, this woman spokesman provides the more realistic, perceptive and witty attitude, and through her independent spirit reflects the feminism of the author. The disparity between temperament and outlook of the two central viewpoints, that of the conventional, rather prosaic male and that of the perceptive, articulate female, contributes to the tension of the novels and provides variety of tone and pace, an asset lacking in Riccoboni's novel with its single correspondent. Thematically both of Brooke's novels are concerned with courtship and its complexities, employing the sentimental romantic plot to which Madame Riccoboni had made such a signal contribution. In both novels Mrs. Brooke questions social conventions, arranged marriages, and materialistic values in general. In both, sensibility is the overriding virtue of hero and heroine.

Today we direct our attention more to the Canadian novel with its interpretation of eighteenth-century Canadian setting and its view of life in Quebec immediately after the conquest. Yet a return to the earlier and more popular novel adds to our understanding of Frances Brooke, of her craftsmanship and her thematic concerns, and helps us to see her in the context of her times. She learned from the French novel of sensibility and especially from Madame Riccoboni whom she translated: and there is no doubt that she took the overall structure and handling of narrative from her own first successful novel and adapted them to her new subject and new setting in The History of Emily Montague. Mrs. Brooke's popular translation of Lady Catesby and her own first novel contributed to the development of the English novel of sensibility. But Mrs. Brooke is also one of the earliest novelists to attempt a more realistic account of everyday events rather than a focussing on melodramatic incidents. This concern is evident in her portrayal of life on the Belmont estate with its outings, balls, and rural festivities, and later, in Emily Montague, of day-to-day events in Quebec, in which regional setting is incorporated more fully into the narrative. Thus she contributed to the newer movement toward realism as well as to the more currently popular cult of sensibility. A stylistic blending of the two modes is achieved largely through the voices of the two dissimilar correspondents in each novel, one a creature of extreme sensibility and the other an ironic observer. The contrasting images of women, the traditional eighteenth-century woman of feeling and the witty, astute commentator, also contribute to the tension between the sensible and the realistic, the romantic and the ironic. Indeed, not the least of Mrs. Brooke's concerns is the role of women in eighteenth-century society; and a major attraction of both novels, one which differentiates her fiction from that of her mentor Madame Riccoboni and others of her time, is her creation of an intelligent and lively spokesman for women.

Notes

¹ There is one exception. W. H. New's excellent article "The Old Maid: Frances Brooke's Apprentice Feminism," Journal of Canadian Fiction, 2, No. 3 (Summer 1973), 9-12, shows the significance of Mrs. Brooke's periodical in her thematic and stylistic development.

² Three editions were published the first year, 1763, a fourth in 1765, and later editions in 1769, 1773, Dublin 1775, 1782. Also, reference to Mrs. Brooke usually identified her by describing her as the author of The History of Lady Julia Mandeville. Fanny Burney, when taken by her mother to meet her, spoke of Mrs. Brooke as "the celebrated authoress of 'Lady Julia Mandeville"' (The Early Diary of Fanny Burney, ed. A. R. Ellis, I, 283).

³ Maurice Levy, Le Roman "Gothique" Anglais 1764-1824 (Toulouse: Universit6 de Toulouse, 1968), p. 179.

⁴ E. A. Baker, The History of the English Novel (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1929), V, 126.

⁵ Francis Wright, Sensibility in English Prose Fiction 1760-1814: A Reinterpretation (New York: Russell and Russell, 1937), 21.

⁶ George Saintsbury says that "Milady Catesby is well worth comparing with [Fanny Burney's] Evelina, which is some twenty years its junior, and the sentimental parts of which are quite in the same tone with it." A History of the French Novel, 2 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1917, rpt. 1964), I, 435.

⁷ All quotations from The Letters of Juliet Lady Catesby to her Friend, Lady Henrietta Campley are from the fourth edition (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764).

⁸ All quotations from The History of Lady Julia Mandeville are from the seventh edition (London: J. Dodsley, 1782, 2 volumes). In volume 2 of this edition pages 193 to 240 do not exist. Signatures indicate that there are no leaves missing, but rather that pages have been incorrectly numbered. This fact has been confirmed by comparison with the 1763 edition.

⁹ In her Histoire du Marquis de Cressy (1758), for more advantageous marriage enters the convent.

¹⁰ John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century; comprising biographical memoirs of William Bowyer…(London: Nichols, Son and Bentley, 1812-15), II, 346-47.

¹¹ Mary Singleton (pseud.), The Old Maid, A New Edition revised and corrected by the Editor (London: A. Millar, 1764), No. 18, p. 149.

¹² It is worth noting, however, that much later Mrs. Brooke wrote a sequel to Julia Mandeville, The History of Charles Mandeville (1790), in which she provides a happier ending. Charles, the supposedly long dead brother of Harry, returns to England a wealthy man and marries Emily Howard, Julia's confidante and her equal in sensibility. Since Emily has become a surrogate daughter to Julia's parents, the marriage provides a happy resolution for the families of both Harry and Julia.

¹³ Laetitia Barbauld, ed., The British Novelists (London: Rivington, 1810), XXVII, p. i.

¹⁴ As the title of his article indicates, W. H. New looks at the feminism in Brooke's Old Maid in his article "The Old Maid: Frances Brooke's Apprentice Feminism."

¹⁵ See John Nichols' Literary Anecdotes re Mrs. Brooke's reference to Garrick in The Old Maid. Mrs. Brooke was criticized severely for this satire by the reviewer of The Excursion in The Monthly Review, LVII (1777), pp. 141-45, who devotes more space to praise of Mr. Garrick than to criticism of the novel. Garrick's own indignation is noted in the following letter:

I hope you have seen how much I am abus'd in yr. Friend Mrs. Brooke's new Novel?—she is pleased to insinuate that [I am] an excellent Actor, a so so author, and Execrable Manager and a Worse Man—Thank you good Madame Brookes—If my heart was not better than my head, I would not give a farthing for the Carcass, but let it dangle, as it would deserve with It's brethren at ye End of Oxford Road—She has invented a Tale about a Tragedy, which is all a Lie, from beginning to ye End—she Even says, that I should reject a Play, if it should be a woman's—there's brutal Malignity for You—have not ye Ladies Mesdames Griffith, Cowley & Cilesia spoke of me before their Plays with an Over-Enthusiastic Econium?—

[Letter 1109, To Frances Cadogan, in The Letters of David Garrick, ed. G. Little and G. M. Kahrl (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), 111, 1172.]

¹⁶ See volume I, pp. 126-29.