After writers like Mrs. Aphra Behn and Mrs. Manley had shown that it was possible for women to write and be read, even to earn money by the exercise of the pen, a host of minor writers had taken up the love novel or novella. The teens and twenties of the century show a proliferation of such works by authors with whose names the veriest dunce of a sorcerer's apprentice would not attempt to conjure: Mrs. Penelope Aubin, Mrs. Jane Barker, Mrs. Mary Davys. Eliza Haywood is the only feminine novelist of the period to achieve any slight degree of lasting fame, and that, the result of Pope's reference in The Dunciad, is largely ill repute. Their works have very few claims to recognition, but they are better than one might expect. No English female author achieved a novel of the classic stature of Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), although that novel, the French romances, and most notably the Lettres Portugaises (1669), had a decided influence upon the English female novel. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century the English writers were moving cautiously away from the more sensational novella-fabliau which had been dependably saleable, and were depending more and more upon psychological interest.

Broadly speaking, the female novel of love can be divided into two types: the seduction/rape tale and the courtship novel. The tale of seduction or rape could ostensibly be justified as serving a moral purpose.…

The heroines of such novels have reactions and emotions rather than a defined personality, but the flux of emotion is often, given its context, well described. The development of female character emerges more fully in the novels of courtship. Marriage in a recognizable (if not clearly defined) contemporary social situation is the subject, and love is seen in relation to marriage. These novels place their emphasis, not upon unbridled passion, but upon correct relationships with the family and upon proper social behaviour. Although the main setting is vague, and there is still some lack of vivid detail, the atmosphere is different from that of the Utopia of gallantry wherein the heroines of the seduction/rape stories seem to dwell. The novelists who dealt with courtship did not entirely forsake the old sensational events of earlier fiction, but the treatment of emotion is in many respects realistic, and more of the practical problems of a young lady's life in the Georgian era are taken into account—problems such as the parental right to choose a daughter's husband, the difficulties in family relationships, problems about money and dowries, the trials of being better educated and more intelligent than is fashionable. Many of the new novels were trying to fulfil some of the functions of the conduct books, by imparting direct or implied advice to women about behaviour. The precepts of the conduct books on duty, obedience, and so on, are examined in relation to the heroine.¹

Most of these novels intentionally bear out the precepts of the conduct books. In one of the most influential of these novels, Mrs. Mary Davys's The Reformed Coquet: or, Memoirs of Amoranda (1724), the spoiled and vain heroine is reformed in a course of surprising adventures which serve to reduce her vanity and instruct her heart. Her guardian, Mentor, who is also in love with her, supervises the process and educates her principles and heart together.² The tone of the novel is gentler than its theme might promise; it is the instruction of the heart, the experience of love on the part of a girl who is not very aware of emotion, which makes her a person, not dry precepts. If the courtship novels are conduct books, they are conduct books with a difference, applying judgement and standards with some delicacy. However old the standards of conduct may be, they have to be realized freshly by the young heroine who is, in the most ordinary courtship, dealing with a circumstance new to her. The female novelists' perception, however limited, that the interest of conduct described in fiction must depend on full realization of the exact case in hand led them to particularize more in the courtship novel than in the novel of passion and seduction. In Mrs. Mary Davys's The Lady's Tale (1725), which illustrates the trials of filial obedience in a courtship, the domestic setting is credible (although vague as to detail); the heroine is witty enough to be entertaining, and the state of her heart is not uninteresting. The heroine of Mrs. Jane Barker's Love's Intrigues; or, The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713) and of its sequel, A Patch Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), is a real personality, and in the first part of her story the author has developed a good novel out of the slightest of plots. Galesia has fallen in love with a young man who, she fears, may not return her feeling. The action is mainly interior; Galesia recounts her own fluctuating emotions, her speculations about how she should behave in her situation, about the feelings of Bosvil on the occasion of their various meetings. The main question, which provides the point of interest, is one which she is never able, even in retrospect, fully to answer: has she let her love for Bosvil show too much, or not enough? She is a consistently drawn character, impetuous, loving, yet reserved and slightly bookish; she seeks solace in intellectual exercise, studying her brother's medical texts. She is able to enjoy her own thoughts, a quality which no English male novelist of the period would attribute to a young lady of her sort. (It might be said that Defoe's Moll Flanders and Roxana enjoy thinking, but these businesslike women enjoy cogitations of strategy, not thought for its own sake. As for Marivaux's Marianne, 'La Paysanne Parvenue', her thoughts, if she can be said to have any, appear to be reflexes of cunning; psychological subtlety is the attribute of the author, not of his character.) The first-person narration of Mary Davys's Abaliza or Jane Barker's Galesia is different from that found in masculine picaresque novels. The emphasis is placed upon the inner feelings of the central character in relation to an event; she is no detached observer, but the centre of emotional conflict, of mental and emotional life. The female novelist, like Jane Austen a century later, understood the heroines' need for leisure to think and be wretched. Even the sensational Mrs. Haywood's Anadea (heroine of what is really a courtship novel) desires solitude rather than 'Company, Noise, and Hurry' when shaken by emotional perplexity.

The female novelists were not attempting to institute a rebellion against masculine domination or the accepted position of women. What they did was quietly to transform the accepted role of woman, not by claiming it should be something else, but by seeing it in a different way. In presenting woman and her reception of experience, her knowledge, her moral choice, her attempt to understand the nuances of situation and her own fluctuation of feeling—her endeavour, in short, to comprehend experience—they implicitly denied an attitude which implicitly held women incapable of important experience. They also brought to the level of literary consciousness material which was to become the stuff of the novel, psychological analysis for which the novel is peculiarly suited, as well as certain modes of presenting this material.

Modes of narration, novelistic devices, had been developed by some of these minor novelists. The first-person narration in the past tense was the best-developed mode, and it is in this kind of narrative, requiring a personal voice, that one is most likely to find attention to style and language, more especially in the courtship novel. Mrs. Davys, for instance, preserves the conversational tone by having Abaliza tell her story to a confidante and interlocutor, and within her retrospective account of her courtship there are lively passages of description and quoted dialogue. The characters occasionally use homely idiom: Abaliza is afraid she might 'make a Botch of my Story'.³ The language of Mrs. Barker's Galesia is easy without vulgarity, often with a touch of humour: 'the only Syntax I study'd was how to make suitable Answers to my Father and him, when the long'd-for Question should be proposed…'⁴

Richardson's age was ready for a complex novel in letters; it had been accustomed to the letter form, either as substance or ornament, in stories dealing with love. The public was also prepared to read tales dealing with the problems of conduct encountered in courtship because of family opposition. The conflict between duty and inclination in the matter of marriage, which is the basis of the plot of Clarissa, and is dealt with for about a quarter of the whole novel, was already a staple of domestic fiction.

In the period before Richardson's work appeared, Mrs. Mary Davys had skilfully introduced the theme of filial obedience in conflict with the heart's inclination into a dramatically realized situation in a novel. The Lady's Tale has a more developed and believable heroine than is usually the case in such prose fiction, and the setting is recognizably middle-class—there is a solidity about Abaliza's home and family that we often search for in vain in the novels of Mrs. Davys's contemporaries. The basis of the story, and the arguments presented, bear a strong resemblance to those in the first part of Clarissa. The usually untroubled relationship between Abaliza and her parents is established at the beginning of the story, with their affectionate reunion on her return home. When they tell her a marriage is being arranged for her, she is a trifle appalled at the prospect of matrimony. As she tells her mother: 'I think it is a State that requires more Sedateness and Gravity than is usually found in Eighteen … I do assure you Madam … it wou'd have been more agreeable to my temper, had you injoin'd me to Celibacy for Life …'⁵ When she meets her proposed suitor, Adrastus, she finds him stupid and disgusting, and is unwilling to give her hand where she cannot give her heart.⁶ She pleads with her father not to make her marry:

Can that Parent love a Child, that would sacrifice its worldly Happiness to its own Caprice? Beside, what can be more solemn than the Charge given us in the Marriage Ceremony, where we are commanded in the Presence of Heaven to declare we have no Impediment, and can there be a greater, than to give my self to a Man I hate?⁷

Her father says she should learn prudence and consult her own good. She endeavours to reassure him, promising 'I will never dispose of myself while you live, without your Approbation and Consent; for I can with much more pleasure deny the Man I love, than take the Man I loath.'⁸ In this novel, it is moving to find Abaliza pleading with her father in such a manner, because the relationship between them has been shown to be affectionate, and their conversation is usually a pleasant exchange of raillery. The reader is reminded, as is Abaliza, that her father does possess a serious authority over her, which he could exercise to make her life miserable.…

It is worth remarking that both Mrs. Davys's Abaliza and Mrs. Haywood's Anadea express, like Clarissa, a desire to live single rather than marry. By the time Richardson wrote his novels, it would appear that the preference for the single life had become a convention, particularly in descriptions of a heroine faced with unwelcome suitors. (Harriet, in Sir Charles Grandison, has the same attitude when she is pressed by other suitors before she meets Sir Charles.) Some modern critics have seen in Clarissa's wish indications of frigidity, or worse; the vulgarized psychology of this type of criticism shows a disregard for the conventions from which Clarissa is derived, as well as for the intent and structure of the novel. The heroine's wish to live single is an expression of her innocence, modesty, and chastity—qualities which the eighteenth century thought excellent things in a woman. The desire for the single life can also be an expression of youthful ignorance of the power of love, a power which the heroine is shortly to experience, as Harriet does. More than that, the wish is an expression of the heroine's independence. In the novels of female writers such as Mrs. Davys, the character of the heroine is beginning to be established as that of an individual in her own right, who does not desire to live merely as the adjunct of a man, at least not of any man. It is this right which Richardson championed so strongly in the delineation of his female characters.

In Mrs. Davys's The Lady's Tale Abaliza's distress is realistically and dramatically presented. When she pleads against an enforced betrothal, she is not in love with anybody else; her protestation that she cannot marry a man whom she dislikes is, like Clarissa's, completely genuine. It is not an excuse made because she loves another man, as is usually the case with stage heroines, from Juliet onwards. Complications do arise when Abaliza falls in love with the young Alcipius, but Mrs. Davys refuses to allow her heroine to abandon the sacred duty of filial obedience. Since her father is a kind and understanding parent, Abaliza's situation resolves itself happily.

In this novel, Mrs. Davys endeavours to create a system of relationships in which both filial duty and the force of love are allowed their full weight. The sprightly style of the narrative allows no moral pontification, but the characters are shown to be virtuous and responsible in social duties. In traditional stage comedy, rules of conduct and of social duty can be flouted with impunity. A father's choice can be brushed aside: 'Fathers seldom chuse well', remarks Hipollita in The Gentleman Dancing-Master.⁹ In some of the sentimental plays, such as Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722), family duty is presented with exaggerated seriousness, but it is more usual for the father to be presented as comically or repellently short-sighted, and for young love to triumph by somewhat disingenuous means, as in Steele's The Tender Husband (1705), or Mrs. Centlivre's The Busybody (1708). The novelists were more realistic in presenting the problems of behaviour within the family in a manner neither exaggeratedly sentimental nor comic. The codes of behaviour, and the family, were there to be recognized in ordinary life. In the eighteenth century, the father possessed enormous power to dispose of his daughter's hand in marriage as he saw fit.…

Notes

¹ Katherine Hornbeak has pointed out the relation of the conduct books to Richardson's novels in their treatment of family rights and duties ('Richardson's Familiar Letters and the Domestic Conduct Books', Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, xix (Jan. 1938)), but she does not mention that such points had already been presented in prose fiction.

² The novel is partly a feminine version of Télémaque. This is probably the first appearance in English prose fiction of the lover-mentor, a character type to be found in some degree in Sir Charles Grandison, very definitely in Fanny Burney's Edgar Mandlebert in Camilla (1796), and (improved beyond recognition) in Jane Austen's Mr. Knightley and Edmund Bertram.…

³ Mary Davys, The Works of Mrs. Davys, 2 vols., 1725, vol. ii, The Lady's Tale, p. 125.

⁴ Jane Barker, The Entertaining Novels of Mrs. Jane Barker, 2nd. ed., 2 vols., 1719, vol. ii, The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, p. 19.…

⁵ Davys, Works, vol. ii, The Lady's Tale, p. 126.

⁶ Ibid., p. 140.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 141-2.

⁸ Ibid., p. 142.…

⁹ William Wycherley, The Gentleman Dancing-Master, 1673, 1, i, p. 2.…