SOURCE: "Woman's Influence," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XI, No. 1, Spring, 1979, pp. 3-22.

[In the essay that follows, Backscheider examines some methods of influencing other people, particularly men, and bringing about change that female authors of early novels gave to their female characters.]

The meaning and attainment of influence, power, and success frequently provide conflicts and themes for fiction. In spite of the fact that female writers were necessarily concerned with these concepts, that readers of novels were predominantly women, and that the issues of the Feminist Controversy remained alive throughout the eighteenth century, critics have paid little attention to a central problem for the heroine of many early English novels by women: discovering appropriate and effective ways to influence the men around her.

In Jane Barker's Love Intrigues, the heroine Galesia describes her girlhood experiences in order to divert a friend from the melancholy news of the War of the Spanish Succession:

I shall delight myself to see the Blood pour out of his false Heart; In order to accomplish this detestable Freak, I went towards the place of his Abode, supposing a Rapier in my hand, and saying to my self; the false Bosvil shou'd now disquiet me no more, nor any other of our Sex; in him I will end his Race, no more of them shall come to disturb, or affront Woman-kind; this only Son, shall die by the hands of me an only Daughter; and however the World may call it Cruelty, or barbarous; I am sure our Sex will have reason to thank me, and keep an Annual Festival, on which a Criminal like him is executed….¹

Although this passage is somewhat unusual because it is so explicit in its fantasy of the planned act of violence and in its fantasy of the meaning of the event, it is representative of a common strain in many novels written by women in the Restoration and eighteenth century.² First, the heroine must find the means to exert influence in a male-dominated world. Second, violence, especially planned violence, is by no means unusual. Third, the female character sees herself as a representative of her sex, a victim of the "wrongs of woman" which are fairly consistent, and likely to be understood by women. The quotation says that the "world will call it barbarous"; the judging world is male. Women, however, will understand and appoint a festival day. Finally, the man has commited a "crime" which women recognize as being analogous to a legally punishable offense. This crime forces the woman into a position in which she becomes a "freak" or perpetuates a "freakish" action.

Mrs. Barker's story outlines the formulaic treatment³ of the problem of influence in the early novels by women. Such tales operate as escape literature does: they engage the reader immediately in a story full of action and accessible emotion which usually requires little interpretation of character or meaning. The story, however, especially when seen as a set of conventions, reveals the anxieties, conflicts, and daydreams of a definable group of people. More significantly for our purposes, escape literature shows characters in rebellion and, ultimately, in compliance with realistic social situations and conventional opinions. The heroine must pit herself not only against the men she needs to influence, but also against opinion that does not label the male's behavior as criminal but judges her as "freakish." The reader is asked to understand her action, but also is expected to recognize that the action will determine the woman's limitations and the story's resolution.⁴

My purpose is to delineate the means and limits of influence in novels by women, to examine some of the conventions, and to conclude with some observations and speculations about the implications of the conventions used in the novels by women. Although I found few differences between the means of influence and formulae in novels by men and those by women, I shall focus exclusively on the novels by women except to point out particularly intriguing contrasts. I do not pretend to offer an exhaustive treatment of the implications of this theme, but rather to suggest some problems and lines of inquiry for future investigation.

I

In many early novels, the situation of the heroine follows a familiar pattern. Her beauty or wealth makes her desirable;⁵ her family (if she has one) has plans for her which seldom take into account her future happiness; an undesirable man wants to possess her. She is confined to a house, often to a single room; her privacy, her self are under siege. Paradoxically, her cocoon-like situation forces her to assert herself and influence others. Her position and training instruct her in one role and her "heart" in another. Her education and her role have taught her to submit, to dissemble, and to flirt. Her new situation necessitates resistance to fathers, brothers, and lovers.

The most common means of influence to which the heroines resort are outgrowths of prescribed feminine and, therefore, "normal" behavior: appeals to an "indulgent" father or a favorite uncle, insistence on the rights of beauty, virtue, or social class, compromise, and feigned modesty. A typical example, Eliza Haywood's Philidore and Placentia (1727), shows Placentia falling in love with Philidore during the time he is impersonating a servant in order to be near her. Because of her beauty and social class, she insists on her right to marry him. When he refuses, she is enraged and sends him away. Almost immediately, Placentia regrets her rash act and follows him to sea. When the captain of the ship insists that he will marry her or rape her, she again acts in a manner that extends her feminine role. First, she reverts to an appeal to her rank and hopes that her superiority will keep him at bay. Frightened by his persistence, she begs for three days to consider his proposal. By pretending to compromise, she gains a little time, but an outsider is required to rescue her.⁶

When the methods that extend normal female patterns of influence fail, the heroine may begin to nag, to show contempt, or to demand the "right" of refusal of a suitor. At this point, the heroine displays little awareness of the seriousness of the threat to her, but shows a growing understanding of her helplessness. All of these means of influence in the novels I have examined are completely ineffectual. Such methods are unacceptable patterns of behavior in male society, but they are not violent enough to have any effect. In fact, the authority figure exerts extra effort in order to maintain or restore the balance of influence which he sees as correct.⁷ Clementia, for example, in Haywood's Agreeable Caledonian (1729), dismisses with contempt the cardinal whom her father intends her to marry and is confined to a very strict convent as punishment. Yxmilla in The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) is rewarded for her contempt of Broscomin with a forced marriage and a brutal wedding night.

Immediacy of danger elicits extreme behavior from the heroines of the books. The more rigid the constraints, the more threatening the situation, the more violent the behavior of the heroine. In some cases, the behavior is the most extreme example of feminine despair: helpless, desperate weeping. The last stages of desperation call forth a weeping marked by violence. Women "tear their ruffles," roll on the floor, fling themselves against bedposts, even claw their faces. They have no plans to influence at this point. The girlish tears, the artfully moist eyes and trembling lip have no part in these scenes. The more strong-willed the heroine, the more violent the weeping. Clementia, who will eventually escape the convent with her best friend's fiancé, is described in a typical passage: "In the Anguish of her Soul, she tore not only her Hair and Garments, but her very Face. And her Woman, who alone was Witness of her Disorders, fearing she would commit some Violence against her own Life, endeavor'd all she could to pacify her, but in vain; the stormy Passions rolling in her Mind, grew stronger by Opposition…. "⁸ Only a single confidante, one helpless to relieve the heroine and without influence with the authority figure, witnesses such weeping.

Such weeping expresses helplessness and rage. The impulse is self-destructive rather than charming. Compare, for example, the stock description of the weeping beauty in distress from Sarah Scott and Barbara Montagu's Millenium Hall (1762): "Tears insensibly stole down her face, and bestowed on it still greater charms than it had ever yet worn, by giving her an air of tenderness, which led him to hope that she did not behold his passion with indifference."⁹ Tears like these express strong emotion, pity, sentiment, weakness, disappointment, distress—feminine frailty and tenderness. Violent weeping, accompanied by frenzied movement and disordered clothing, becomes an expression of frustration and anger turned upon the woman herself.

Tears are one of the most important means of influence and of the expression of emotion in novels by male writers in the century. Because they went to considerable pains to separate themselves and their books from the formula novels,¹⁰ their treatment of conventional elements holds considerable interest. Henry Fielding's women influence because of their beauty and virtue.¹¹ Their eyes are especially expressive: when Tom rescues Sophia after her horse rears, her looks tell her passionate feelings; later she sinks trembling in a chair after her father insists that she must marry Blifil and "had not a Flood of Tears come immediately to her Relief, perhaps worse had followed." These tears lack the substance of real grief and despair; they provide the release for strong but brief emotion over the thwarting of desire. The diction is decidedly light. Sophia Western often takes direct action, as she does when she escapes from her house and sets out for London. She appears both resourceful and naive, and her undertaking is more dramatic than desperate. Again Fielding's tone and diction determine the reader's reaction.

Richardson shares much of women's sense of limitations, their understanding of what means of influence are at their disposal, and their perception of men as looming figures in their world. Because he shares some of their sensibility, the novels by women provide new contextual reasons for Richardson's achievement. His characters are physically threatened in a way that Defoe's, Fielding's, and Smollett's are not. Beauty is a trap, not power for Richardson's female characters. They realize their helplessness and contemplate violence against themselves or descend into madness.¹² Rather than seeking to gain security in marriage, they hope to retain enough influence to protect themselves. This contrast between Richardson's and the other male novelists' perception of the conflict may explain some of the harsh criticism and ridicule directed at Pamela's behavior. A number of satires turn upon their authors' inabilities to conceive of Pamela in terms other than scheming with marriage as the goal. Anti-Pamela: or, Feign 'd Innocence detected (1742) exposes Syrena Tricksy's attempts to snare a husband and a fortune. Not only does she have her mother's help, but she takes advantage of anyone showing her kindness.¹³

Clarissa's streaming eyes are among the "assemblage of beauties" which Lovelace catalogues, but Lovelace's finding them attractive adds to the picture of Lovelace the perverted villain. Clarissa's feelings are diametrically opposed to Lovelace's reaction. She is not trying to influence; in fact, she feels that all is lost. She is despairing because she is in Lovelace's power and for a moment has not even kept her feelings within her own control; her consciousness, not her beauty, is what Richardson focuses on, but he adds the dimension of revelation about Lovelace. That Lovelace enjoys being moved by Clarissa's grief increases our revulsion at his misuse of power. Similarly, Pamela is told by B. that she is "most beautiful" in her tears. Pamela is cowering in the corner of the room; the last thing she wants at that moment is to be attractive. Once again, Richardson has shown the coincidence of the woman's helpless, trapped feelings with the man's desire and sense of power. Richardson, however, moves toward the domestic and conventional novels in Grandison. Clementina is not allowed the religious withdrawal of Clarissa.¹⁴ Worse, the tears and physical expressions of emotions are not the overflow of recognized internal conflict; they seem to be the whole of the feelings conventionally expressed. And they are the only signs of sympathy or disappointment except in the sections in which Clementina's situation parallels Clarissa's. Clarissa seems to seethe with emotions too great to be confined; her tears imply passion within. Clarissa and many of the heroines of the early novels by women weep because words and actions are inadequate and futile. Harriet Byron, on the other hand, seems to express all of the emotion she feels.

A second response to immediate threat is the most extreme example of behavior foreign to the perceived character of women; physical violence. The last resort of the threatened woman who wants to control her own destiny, the violence often begins directed at another, then is turned on the woman herself. Such fantasy scenes as the one quoted from Jane Barker's Love Intrigues (1727) end with the woman considering suicide. Placentia in Haywood's Philidore and Placentia (1727) threatens to kill herself with a penknife some twently years before Clarissa Harlowe intimidates Lovelace with the same weapon.¹⁵ Sophia, a character in Haywood's History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), defends her virtue from her fiancé by placing herself in front of an open upstairs window while she holds him at bay with his sword. She seems to be poised between throwing herself out of the window and stabbing him. The gesture which began aimed at the male could in an instant be turned on the woman against herself.

Other women turn infatuated men into weapons. Miranda in Aphra Behn's Fair Jilt (1688) is able to send a page and her husband to kill Alcidiana, her sister. Just as deadly is a traditional feminine weapon, gossip. Elvira enlists Don Alvaro in her jealous cause and directs a rumor which kills Constantia in Behn's Agnes de Castro (1688). Miranda ruins Father Francisco by crying "rape" in The Fair Jilt. Dorimene brings about Dumont's death by threatening Isabelle in David Simple (1744). The tongue is often intended to be and is a murderous weapon.

A few female characters use weapons or unusual force on men. Isabella in Aphra Behn's Fair Vowbreaker (1688) kills both her husbands. She smothers the first husband, who has come home from the war after she presumed him dead, packs him in an oat sack, stitches that to her second husband's collar when he offers to dispose of the body, and both go over the waterfall. Atlante, in Behn's Lucky Mistake (1688), threatens Vernole with a pistol to preserve her privacy. Eovaai frees herself from Ochihatou, the magician, by physical strength and breaks his wand, symbol of masculine power.

Some heroines, however, are able to exert influence even in situations that seem hopeless. Miranda in The Mercenary Lover (1726) controls one of the most cruel characters in any of the novels with her knowledge of her husband's incestuous affair. Rivella exerts influence solely because she "knows how to live." D'Aumont, having heard the story of Rivella's life, says, "let us not lose a Moment before we are acquainted with the only Person of her Sex that knows how to Live, and of whom we may say, in relation to Love, since she has so peculiar a Genius for, and has made such noble Discoveries in that Passion, that it would have been a Fault in her, not to have been Faulty."¹⁶ Delariviere Manley's description affirms that Rivella is unusual, "the only one of her Sex," and that she is "faulty," but affirms Rivella's freedom and lifestyle.

Fainting, another conventional means of influence, provides a key to understanding the courage and quality of the heroine in some novels. Female characters who receive catastrophically bad news or are about to be raped often faint. The heroine who faints is overwhelmed; she surrenders the capacity to see the issues, the will to resist, and the rational capacity to know. Eliza Haywood's very popular novel Love in Excess (1719) includes a number of illustrations of common incidents of fainting. The heroine of Part I, Alovisa, is an immodest schemer. Motivated by lust and ambition, she sends letters to D'Elmont and engineers the rival's removal to a convent. Alovisa faints twice: once when her letter to D'Elmont is misunderstood and he dances with the rival, Amena, and once when she discovers D'Elmont in bed with another woman. In each case, her fainting symbolizes despair. Amena, the rival, faints when she finds out that she can never go back home. Their fainting broadcasts their weakness.

The most noble heroines never faint but face any situation relentlessly. Haywood's Althea in The Mercenary Lover (1726) has something of the tragic vision. She struggles in hopeless situations and recognizes her share of the responsibility for her predicament and helplessness, therefore suffering more intensely. Althea has been the epitome of feminine prudence and virtue. Living a retired life with her beloved sister and brother-in-law, she falls under the brother-in-law's influence. He finally overwhelms her, rapes her, then poisons her. Her understanding of her actions makes the last months of her life a prolonged hell, suitably ended by an agonizing death from the poison. Yxmilla in The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) resists marriage to Broscomin courageously. When she does faint, Broscomin seizes the opportunity, has the priests wave the sacred bough over her head, and marries her. Eovaai, in contrast to Yxmilla, never faints, although Ochihatou threatens her in more frightening ways.

By midcentury, domestic intrigue and social humiliations replace rapes, poisonings, sorcerers, and convents in escape literature.¹⁷ Changes in the conventions found in such novels often provide imaginative constructs for new anxieties and daydreams. Some values appear to be assimilated, certain causes for rebellion evaporate, and new mores and dissatisfactions surface. The threat of an unfulfilling marriage based on the male's desire to possess the heroine gives way to greater emphasis on courtship designed to establish mutual respect. The novelists expand their investigations of influence, and the problem of legitimate and illegitimate forms of influence provide the themes for some of the best women writers of the second half of the century.

Elizabeth Inchbald's Simple Story (1791) seems to say that "love is the desire to dominate." Miss Milner and Matilda, heroines of the novel, represent a contrast; Matilda's means of influence are legitimate and "feminine," while Miss Milner's are not. Both women try to influence the same men, Dorriforth, the guardian who marries Miss Milner and fathers Matilda, and Sandford, Dorriforth's tutor. Miss Milner has obeyed Dorriforth as long as he is her guardian because of his inflexible good manners. Once they are engaged, she insists on the rights of a beautiful woman and of a fiancée. She will dominate and control, she says, and force him to forgive the unforgivable. She admits that she wants to test her power over his affections. The result is a broken engagement. Matilda must try to win the affection of Dorriforth and does so with complete obedience, prudent behavior, and blind affection. Miss Milner has submitted to her social role with poor grace and used it as an excuse when convenient. Matilda is completely submissive. Even the minor characters, like the meek, exemplary Miss Woodley, maneuver to exert influence. She interests herself for Miss Milner repeatedly, but when she is afraid that Miss Milner will corrupt Dorriforth the priest, she sends her away. In telling Dorriforth that Miss Milner loves him and in refusing to exile herself from his table, she controls. Like her predecessors in the romances, however, all of the women weep in helpless agony when they cannot influence Dorriforth.

Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778) must learn the legitimate methods of feminine influence. Her humiliations and disappointments result from inappropriate maneuvering. Evelina tries to keep herself free to dance with Lord Orville at a ridotto, is exposed in the attempt, and bursts into tears. She cannot manage Sir Clement Willoughby or her relatives and is disappointed time after time in her desire to be with Lord Orville. Lord Orville himself has defined feminine influence as informed, sensible, and modest behavior which does not "seize the soul by surprise, but, with more dangerous fascination, she steals it almost imperceptibly." At a performance of Love for Love, Orville remarks that "Angelica bestows her hand rather with the air of a benefactress, than with the tenderness of a mistress…. The uncertainty in which she keeps Valentine, and her manner of trifling with his temper, give no very favourable idea of her own."¹⁸ Evelina learns social grace and effective means of influence. At one point, she demonstrates the use of the social code for influence. Orville asks her to go to Bath with him to "convince the world you encourage no mere danglers." "You teach me, then, my Lord, the inference I might expect, if I complied," she answers and has her way. Her honesty, good sense, and benevolence win both her father and husband. She trifles with no one.

Burney does, however, explore the effects and the social and personal meaning of means of influence in considerable depth just as other women writers do. Evelina would like to have things her own way and often agrees with Mrs. Selwyn, but she knows the image others have of the older woman.¹⁹ Madame Duval is punished repeatedly for her inappropriate attempts to control. Evelina explores the meaning of forms of influence and learns to reconcile her internal needs and values with external opinions. Success is often measured in unexpected ways.²⁰ In the novels by men, influence leads to the woman's being crowned with an appropriate marriage; in many of the novels by women, influence becomes confined to an appropriate sphere and to appropriate methods that protect the heroine from future humiliation and disquiet. In both sexes' novels with happy endings, the heroine earns the respect of her husband and, thereby, assures herself of future influence.

The means of feminine influence have subtle variations in the domestic, sentimental novels of the second half of the century. The History of Emily Montague (1769) by Frances Brooke has almost no action, but presents four different women, each intent on marrying. Emily Montague is a paragon, and like Rivella, knows how to live (but Frances Brooke means something completely different by "live" from Delariviere Manley). Emily Montague influences by her virtue and her straightforward behavior. At a costume ball, she dresses as a French peasant, a representation of her simplicity and artlessness. Arabella Fermor, the familiar lively foil, named with some justification after Pope's heroine,²¹ is a coquette who ensnares her intended with feminine tricks, and so it goes. Only one of the women comes to a bad end: she dies in a hovel with her illegitimate child. The obstacles to marriage are minor; the concern is manipulation of men by women. The more honorable the methods, the greater the reward for the women.

John Richetti has argued that the scandalous memoirs of the eighteenth century provided an important release for liberating fantasies for women in a time of great social limitation.²² Perhaps the extremes of behavior in female characters created by women indicate deep feelings of helplessness and hostility, a complex blend of the futility of action and of wish fulfillment. Insistence on the rights of beauty and birth, compromise, nagging, showing contempt, weeping, and physical violence are all attempts to influence men, but they carry an underlying fear of female helplessness. Modifications in the presentations of means of influence suggest that women writers were well aware of the problems of credibility and effectiveness.

II

The recognition of external and internal limits circumscribing women's lives and the demands for more realistic fiction may have reduced the kinds of influence women writers assign to their heroines, but this consciousness of barriers provides the impetus for the establishment of conventions in plotting, for some of the best burlesques of formula novels, and, most significantly for the development of the novel, for the exploration of the psyche under the stress of bringing the inner self into harmony with the social self.²³

In the novels by women, the female characters are largely responsible for advancing the plot up to a point. Circumstances and the actions of male characters become increasingly decisive, but the focus remains upon the female character. For example, Isabella in The Fair Vowbreaker (1688) decides to leave the convent and marry. The decision is her own. Throughout the marriage, their problems are explained through her emotions. Henault joins the army to repair his fortune, but only after Isabella has released him. She assumes him dead after a time, remarries, but he returns. She kills him, then kills her second husband. At each point, she acts alone. Such independent action in the early part of the novels by women is typical. Even the most ladylike heroine, Emily Montague, is chiefly responsible for the plot's progress. She breaks her engagement with Sir George, she makes her love for Ed Rivers obvious, she leaves Canada forcing him to follow her, and it is her guardian who makes them a wealthy couple.

Several decisions seem to be the prerogative of the female character: she decides which man is acceptable, she selects the man she wants to marry, she writes to someone, she devises a plan, she confides in someone, she runs away, she selects the moment to "submit" to the chosen object of her affection if there is a happy ending. At each of these stages, the woman usually advances the plot.

At some point, however, the heroine's influence ends. Her ability to awe the man by beauty, by position, or by virtue is at an end. Her tactics to delay the settlement have been exhausted. Then the heroine casts about her, sees she is trapped, and may behave in extreme ways. Isabella in The Fair Vowbreaker (1688) kills her husband only when she feels that discovery and ruin are inevitable. Significantly, she runs about her apartments like a trapped mouse in a maze before and after the murder. The novels end with the death of the heroine, with a miraculous rescue brought about by coincidences, or by the appearance of the real lover. In any case, influence is out of the heroine's hands. Eovaai, who has delayed so long, fought so valiantly, escaped and broken Ochihatou's wand, ends her struggle tied naked to a tree. Ochihatou intends to beat her with nettles. Dorriforth relents and marries Miss Milner. Coincidence, common in the eighteenth-century novel, is especially strong in the formula novel's ending—a lost father or uncle appears, a brother has been castrated by a sultan leaving his sister the only heir to the family fortune.

The women writers seem to know the limits of credibility of their heroine's power. No matter how prudent, beautiful, virtuous, and deserving the woman is, her influence is limited. At some point, usually marked by extreme behavior, power shifts to the male characters. The recognition of feminine helplessness results in more than violent behavior: it determines stock endings. If there is a happy ending, it is because the male character has taken over or a rich benefactor has appeared.²⁴ Clementia, for example, seduces Broscomin away from her only friend and plants the idea of their running away as a test of their ingenuity which suits them for each other, but it is he who devises the means for her escape. Rivers arranges property settlements so that he and Emily Montague can marry, and her wealthy male guardian appears to solve her difficulties.

Unhappy endings are more frequent in the early half of the century. The faithful woman dies. Constantia grieves to death. Camilla dies and leaves David Simple prostrated with sorrow. The evil woman is caught; then she can be beheaded as Isabella is or she can repent as Miranda does. Jane Barker's characters come to the most provocative ends: Galesia in Love Intrigues (1713) decides to become a poet and affects eccentric dress; another is married to a fish in Exilius (1715).

A few perceptive female novelists burlesque the means of influence. Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote catalogues the conventions of earlier novels. Arabella, steeped in French romances, believes in the absolute power of woman before marriage. She is certain that everyone from Edward the gardener, a casual passerby, and serious suitors intend to commit verbal outrages (declaring their passions), kidnap and "ravish" her, or kill themselves in despair. In the midst of her sense of power she lives in constant insecurity. Her rightful powers, she believes, include banishing men, making them wait for her for years, insisting upon heroic deeds, and having absolute control over whether they live or die.

By 1752, Lennox can both ridicule and rework the conventions. She exposes the impracticality and absurdity of the conventions in nearly every assumption and speech by Arabella, but she also makes Glanville conform to them in ironic ways. Glanville loves Arabella. This fact puts him as much in Arabella's power as if he were the hero of one of Haywood's novels. He loves her enough to abide by her conventions and wait most of the time. Comic scenes result when he tries to deceive her and pretend knowledge of romances and when he gets sick and will not recover on command. The hero, Arabella says, must undergo many trials to earn his beloved. Paradoxically, he does. Day after day, he tries to keep Arabella from making a fool of herself and suffers the embarrassment of loving a woman who almost everyone has concluded "has her head turned." Eventually Arabella jumps in the Thames in imitation of Clelia's swimming the Tiber. Arabella's doctor persuades her that romances are not histories, and she blushes for her folly and marries Glanville.

These few novelists see the absurdity of the conventions clearly. Lennox has Arabella explain that threatened ladies "are terrify'd into a fainting Fit, and seldom recover till they are conveniently carried away; and when they awake, find themselves many Miles off in the Power of their Ravisher."²⁵ Jane Austen writes in Love and Freindship: "I die a Martyr to my greif (sic) for the loss of Augustus. . One fatal swoon has cost me my Life… Beware of swoons Dear Laura…. A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequences—Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—"²⁶

The conventions of escape literature provide subject matter and form for novelists from mid-eighteenth century to the present. The relationship between so-called escape or "entertainment" literature and "serious" literature is complex, the influences tangled inextricably, yet each vitalizes the other and each reveals much about the other. Although escape literature never departs far from its conventions, it can feed upon different kinds of novels and gradually assimilate their characters, forms, and opinions. Such conventions provide an immediately accessible imaginary world and a set of characters and situations which may be used as a kind of shorthand or as an interlude or, as Lennox, Austen, and Agnes Bennet (Countess of Castle Howel, 1794) did, as the subject of ridicule.

Fielding, for example, often parodies conventional scenes and emotional displays. Joseph Andrews includes the mock romance of Leonora told by the "well-bred lady" in the coach. Although the plot follows the pattern of the vain woman's downfall, the heroine's emotional outbursts are exaggerated. Fielding selects four points in the plot, describes them, and exposes the predictability of the emotional outcome. Leonora's love is obvious to everyone, for example, but when Horatio "declares" it, she pretends to be overcome, blushes, trembles, and has to be helped back inside. Drawing upon the common accusation that women fall in love with coaches rather than with men, Fielding next shows Leonora exclaiming, "O, I am in love with that equipage!" as Bellarmine passes. Her thoughts and postures make her ridiculous, but she soon ensnares the fortune hunter, Bellarmine. Bellarmine and Horatio duel, Bellarmine is wounded, and Leonora receives the news with extravagant despair; she "danced about the room in a frantic manner, tore her hair and beat her breast in all the agonies of despair." Finally, Leonora learns that Bellarmine's interest in her was as shallow and materialistic as her own, and she finds herself abandoned. She retires to a country-house and lives a "disconsolate life." The well-bred lady is well aware of the reaction to such romances, and she reminds her listeners that they feel both pity and censure toward Leonora. Fielding further satirizes the conventional story by having it told by women and especially by giving the women many of the uncharitable, frivolous, and affected characteristics of Leonora and Lindamira.

The romance as interlude became commonplace. Isabelle's story in David Simple, Matilda's in The Vicar of Wakefield, and many others carry the convention into the nineteenth century. Dorothea's story in Mary Collyer's Felicia to Charlotte (1749) supplies the tyrannical father, the complication of the heroine's Catholic faith, and a suspicion of theft to a more realistic interlude. These interpolations became increasingly fantastic and novel in the hands of the late eighteenth-century novelists.

A third response to the limitations experienced by eighteenth-century women was the emphasis on woman's interior world. As Patricia Meyer Spacks perceptively argues,

The nature of public and private selves, these eighteenth-century texts suggest, is for women, in some ways, the reverse of what it is for men…. For women … the public self often stresses weakness. Passivity and compliance comprise the acceptable poses that fictional and factual heroines alike employ.

Anger, aggression, forcefulness belong to the inner self.²⁷

The novels provide the means to express anger, the grounds to test the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and, in their conclusions, material for self-pity or the affirmation of compliance with social demands.

Some of the more fantastic novels express the themes of rebellion and compliance through extreme episodes. Isabella in The Fair Vowbreaker seems to act almost entirely from her heart. She falls in love and leaves the convent, wants to preserve her marriage and kills her first husband, then kills the second out of fear of reproach. She rebels against all the traditional vows—religious, marital, and legal—which exist to restrict her actions. "Nature was frail, and the Tempter strong," Mrs. Behn records. Although Isabella asserts her innocence, the narrator frequently calls attention to her broken vows and to the number of times Isabella "dissembles." Both of her marriages have given her a great deal of freedom. Since she is childless, she is free to do as she pleases, and the wealth of her second husband increases her liberty. Henault's return means that she will lose the wealth and tranquillity of her second marriage, and she kills Henault. Villenoys's knowledge of the death puts her in his power, and she imagines his reproaching her and kills him. These two murders bring the wrath of heaven down on her. She imagines herself pursued by her dead lover, she suffers from insomnia and nightmares alternately, and finally confesses. She "joyfully" receives the death sentence and dies a penitent. Her passion for her husbands, her frail reasoning ability, her suffering and finally her full repentance allow the readers to pity her while they condemn her actions. The story provides satisfying fantasies about romantic love and emotional behavior and ends with the lesson that such freedom of choice and self-gratification are impossible and certain to end in ruin. The desire for such liberty can be lamented while conventional morality asserts itself fully at the end. The reader can partake of the forbidden and then reject the course of action and affirm her own experience of the world and woman's options in it.²⁸

While such novels testify to the helplessness of women, they are also powerful expressions of frustration and of the violence which seems to lie dormant in women.²⁹ Jane Barker writes in Love Intrigues that "if the Feebleness of our Hands did not moderate the Fury of our Heads, Woman sometimes wou'd exceed the fiercest Savages."³⁰ Inchbald's Simple Story follows the pattern of rebellion and punishment. Miss Milner insists upon the brief freedom and power of the beloved fiancée: "If he will not submit to be my lover, I will not submit to be his wife—nor has he the affection I require in a husband," she says. She tests this love by dressing in an immodest costume and going to a forbidden masquerade. The warring desires to assert and comply appear in all three parts of the episode. The invitation has appealed to her vanity and curiosity, but she is depressed by Dorriforth's contempt for the event. Dorriforth's attitude toward the amusement turns on her, and by the end of the discussion, he has sneered at the ball, her reading, and her judgment. Her response is to defy his anger and his love. The ball itself clarifies her true feelings. She goes as "Chastity" although her costume suggests the opposite; she wants Dorriforth to admire her, but she is ashamed for him to see her dressed as she is. Her rebellion is grim, but she is determined to carry the action through. In the final part, Dorriforth confronts her. Her first reaction is shame and regret, but his tyrannical behavior and the presence of Sandford leave her torn between grief and anger, and she expresses both, "you think to frighten me by your menaces, but I can part with you; heaven knows I can—your late behaviour has reconciled me to a separation."³¹ Here she recognizes the characteristics in both of their natures which argue against eventual happiness. The entire episode outlines her growing awareness both of Dorriforth's importance to her happiness and the extent of the renunciation required for marriage to him. Although he finally marries her, she continues to disobey him out of revenge and desire for pleasure and admiration. Part II begins with a description of her death in a lonely retreat, exiled for adultery. Here again, the heroine has gone beyond the limits of allowed behavior, and her death allows the sympathetic reader to pity her while assenting to her punishment.

Whenever we examine these heroines, we cannot help noticing their painful impotence. What brief power they gain is often an illusion, even the instrument of the woman's downfall. The only freedom a woman can have comes from the brief indulgence of father and lover tolerated because of her coming total submission, marked appropriately by the loss of her name and many of her legal rights. Men and women acknowledge this freedom as a whim and an anomaly. Yet the insistence upon freedom and the exertion of power immediately before marriage express something profoundly aggressive. Character after character comments on or exults in her influence over her intended. Arabella in The History of Emily Montague (1769) writes, "Fitzgerald takes such amazing pains to please me, that I begin to think it is a pity so much attention should be thrown away…. "³² The more rakish or tyrannical the male, the more the relish of the female. Dorriforth's iron self-control, faultless character, and latent tyranny add danger to Miss Milner's testing of his love. He has controlled her as no other man ever had when she was his ward; she knows he will be the stern master of his household after marriage. Her desire for power and total influence is a reflection of Dorriforth's personality, and a final, last act of rebellion.

Quite often the education of the young woman involves the discovery of perimeters. The heroine has goals and a sense of her own worth but must learn to confine them and express them acceptably. Althea in The Mercenary Lover suffers more because she betrays herself. Heroines in The Auction (1760), Betsy Thoughtless (1751), and The Exemplary Mother (1769) reluctantly decide they must leave husbands regardless of the world's opinion. Self-discovery, self-respect, and harmony within replace the overcoming of external obstacles to marriage as the subject of many novels by women. Austen's protagonists illustrate the emphasis on these themes. Emma, "handsome, clever, and rich," learns lessons in behavior as Burney's Evelina does,³³ but, more important, she comes to know what will make her happy. She speaks of avoiding having her affections "entangled," insists that she will never marry, and enjoys thinking that she knows what is best for Miss Taylor, Mr. Elton, Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, and Harriet. Only after she has been hurt by the Eltons, accepted comfort from Knightley, and admitted her mistakes can she marry. She says, "I was very foolishly tempted to say and do many things which may well lay me open to unpleasant conjectures, but I have no other reason to regret that I was not in the secret earlier." Here she brings together a just appraisal of herself and what she has no reason to know and an awareness of the appearance she gives. Her good sense now promises her suitable influence over Knightley and more tranquillity because she is not entangling herself in others' affairs.

Harmony and self-respect often come from self-control. "Vivacity" usually arouses suspicion, and modesty and prudence replace this youthful quality. Manley's Rivella, Behn's Isabella, and Haywood's Alovisa succumb to their desires for pleasure and freedom. Later Inchbald's Miss Milner comes in from an indiscreet meeting, eyes dancing michievously. She thinks she is attractive and desirable; her actions bring nothing but trouble. Frances Brooke records the general opinion in Emily Montague:

À propos to women, the estimable part of us are divided into two classes only, the tender and the lively.

The former, at the head of which I place Emily, are infinitely more capable of happiness….³⁴

Vivacious women often flirt, and Charlotte Lennox's Harriot Stuart insists, "I was born a coquet and what would have been art in others, in me was pure nature."³⁵ When the heroine insists that her behavior expresses temperament or nature, she usually offers a transparent excuse for lack of self-control. Such lack of restraint is rebellion and may even express self-destructive tendencies. In most cases, however, the behavior concludes with a lesson. Charlotte, the witty city correspondent, joins Felicia in the country and finds happiness in sober conversation after the death of her husband.³⁶

J. Dollard argues in Frustration and Aggression that "the occurrence of aggressive behavior always presupposes the existence of frustration."³⁷ The last step in human destructiveness is aggression turned against the self. Such an act expresses ultimate helplessness, self-loathing,³⁸ and emphasizes the perceived threatening nature of the real object of hostility. In the final analysis, the heroine most often turns the violence against herself. Ciamara in Love in Excess (1719) poisons herself. Galesia gives up her plan to kill Broscomin and plans her own suicide. Constantia lies down and dies. Evelina sobs in humiliation over faults not her own. Miss Milner accepts full responsibility for her unfaithfulness and dies in misery.

Escape literature expresses, explores, and finally rejects opinions and behavior incompatible with the cultural norms of the group. Yet escape literature does more than affirm opinion and allay anxiety; it also reveals aspirations and, many of its readers believe, suggests ways for women to cope.³⁹ The heroine must sometimes overcome obstacles and succeed. Patricia Meyer Spacks points out that "Written largely for female readers, these books exploit contradictory appeals, suggesting that a woman may differ from her kind without penalty but also assuring the reader that, even in the remote country of romance, orthodox definitions of virtue apply and compliance will be rewarded. The hints of strain and resentment that such should be the case rumble just beneath the surface."⁴⁰ Many a heroine "dwindles into a wife." Women writers, faced with the ineluctable social world, turn to the analysis of influence over the self. Burney, Manley, Inchbald, and the best of the women writers had seen the necessity for harmony between the inner and the social selves; a few of them and especially Jane Austen and the nineteenth-century novelists probe woman's inner conflicts.

Success for the heroine, perhaps, should be measured in terms of self-mastery and renunciation. Even so gentle and happy a heroine as Felicia can feel depressed over her coming marriage and single out "honour and obey" as the most formidable words in the marriage ceremony.⁴¹ The number of heroines who become contented wives or widows testifies to the possibilities of happiness measured in somewhat unexpected ways. David Simple's wife carries on in the face of stupefying hardships drawing pleasure from her family and her ability to help others. The Exemplary Mother describes a useful and satisfying widowhood. Felicia accepts her husband's illegitimate daughter. The cost of conforming and the struggle for what one critic calls "private tranquility" becomes a convention in its own right.⁴²

The question remains, however, whether we are defining success and happiness adequately. The significance of many conventions remains to be explored; in fact, the amount of violence in novels by women needs to be recognized and analyzed objectively. Education has been a common excuse for the perceived deficiencies in the novels by women too long; it is time to look for more reasons for the nature of these novels. Perhaps modern critics underestimate the impact of the social restrictions and of woman's frustration and emotional outrage; perhaps we fail to recognize forms of rebellion, means of coping, and success more difficult to achieve than that of the familiar eighteenth-century hero's.*

Notes

¹ Jane Barker, Love Intrigues (New York: Garland, 1973), pp. 43-44, originally published 1713.

² My study includes novels from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Behn's novels clearly influence many later women novelists; by Jane Austen's time, the novel for women is a mature form. Although more than 100 novels were considered, I have selected novels for discussion according to how representative they are, to their quality, and to their contribution to the understanding of the topic. I have tried to include the dreadful and the delightful. Other studies which define the feminine perspective in the novel include Joyce Horner, The English Women Novelists and Their Connection with the Feminist Movement (1688-1797) (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College, 1929-1930); Hazel Mews, Frail Vessels (London: Athlone Press, 1969); Jo Ellen Rudolf, "The Novels that Taught the Ladies" (Diss. Univ. of California, San Diego, 1972); O. P. Sharma, "The Emergence of Feminist Impulse as Aesthetic Vision in the English Novel," Panjab Univ. Research Bulletin (Arts), 2 (1971), 1-28; Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976); Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction" in Granite and Rainbow (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 76-84; Nancy K. Miller, "The Exquisite Cadavers: Women in Eighteenth-Century Fiction," Diacritics, 5 (1975), esp. p. 39: "It is not surprising that the archetypal eighteenth-century novel of the feminine destiny should focus on defloration"; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), pp. 298-99. Sir Walter Scott's review of Emma in The Quarterly Review, 14 (1816), 188-201, makes many of the same points.

³ John G. Cawelti defines formula literature as "a means of generalizing the characteristics of large groups of individual works from certain combinations of cultural materials and archetypal story patterns" and explains its goals as escape and entertainment in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 7 and 13.

⁴ A number of critics have noticed the possibilities of identification with forbidden modes of behavior while denying participation in it because of the fictional form and of the certain punishment of the transgressor. See, for example, Cawelti, pp. 35-36; Simon O. Lesser, Fiction and the Unconscious (Boston: Beacon, 1957), pp. 42 and 104.

⁵ Patricia Meyer Spacks writes

When men write of their own lives, they write of feminine sexuality usually as attraction but also threat. Women exist, sexually, to be conquered by men; but before the conquest takes place, they can cause masculine suffering and even certain forms of masculine capitulation. Women writing of themselves, on the other hand, see their own sexuality often as a trap, an agent of self-defeat, or at best an inadequate fulfillment.

"Reflecting Women," Yale Review, 63 (1973), 32. The point is also made in Professor Spacks's Female Imagination (1972; New York: Avon, 1976), pp. 162-64; and in Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal (New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 189, 206-7.

⁶ Eliza Haywood, Philidore and Placentia (London: Greene, 1727).

⁷ Joan Kelly-Gadol reports the same effect in life in "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History," Signs, 1 (1976), 816.

⁸ Eliza Haywood, The Agreeable Caledonian (New York: Garland, 1973), p. 12; originally published in 1728.

⁹ Sarah Scott and Barbara Montagu, A Description of Millenium Hall, and the Country Adjacent, 2nd ed. corr. (London: Newbery, 1764), p. 119.

¹⁰ See Defoe's prefaces to Moll Flanders (1722) and to Roxana (1724) chapter 1, Book IX, and chapter 1, Book XIV of Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), and the preface to Smollett's Roderick Random (1748).

¹¹ Helen C. Sarchet discusses the "impregnable virtue" of the eighteenth-century heroine in "Women in English Fiction of the Mid-Eighteenth Century from 1740-1771," Diss. Univ. of Minnesota, 1939.

¹² Both Clarissa and Clementina have periods of madness. Again, modern psychologists find madness in women a form of self-destruction. Cf. Walter R. Gove and Jeannette F. Tudor, "Adult Sex Roles and Mental Illness," Changing Women in a Changing Society, Joan Huber, ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 53-54 and 65-66; Walter R. Gove, "Sex, Marital Status, and Suicide," Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 13 (1972), 204, 206, 210-11. Claudeen Cline-Naffziger, "Women's Lives and Frustration, Oppression, and Anger: Some Alternatives," Journal of Counseling Psychology, 21 (1974), 51-52, 55: "They [angry women] are self-destructive since it's not good to express anger, and therefore it must turn inward and be used to deenergize."

Literary studies which discuss this point include Leo Braudy, "Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa," in New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature, Phillip Harth, ed., (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 192-93 and Naney K. Miller, "Female Sexuality and Narrative Structure in La Nouvelle Héloise and Les Liaisons dangereuses," Signs, 1 (1976), 628-29 and 632-33.

¹³Anti-Pamela: or, Feign 'd Innocence Detected (New York: Garland, 1975), reprint of the second edition, 1742. See also Pamela Censured, Augustan Reprint Society (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1976), pp. 21-34, and Fielding's Shamela.

¹⁴ Interestingly enough, women appeal to God for help in novels by men while they rarely do in novels by women. Cynthia Griffin Wolff in "The Problem of Eighteenth-Century Secular Heroinism," Modern Language Studies, 4 (1974), explores the effect of the end of portrayal of religious roles for women, pp. 35-42.

¹⁵ Syrena Tricksy threatens to kill herself with a penknife as part of her ploy to force Mr. L. to marry her, p. 96, Anti-Pamela.

¹⁶ Delariviere Manley, The Adventures of Rivella (New York: Garland, 1972), p. 120; originally published in 1714.

¹⁷ The novel was affected by the age's desire to refine literature and to shape manners and morals. Leonard Welsted's prologue to Steele's Conscious Lovers (1722) insisted, "'Tis yours with breeding to refine the age." Spectator #51 wanted "Wit, Humour, Mirth, good Breeding, and Gallantry" taught to the public. The movement from aristocratic to middle-class literature, its stimuli, and results are detailed in Vineta Colby's Yesterday's Woman. Domestic Realism in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 4, 8, 12, 30; and Mews's Frail Vessels, pp. vii and 7. Cawelti demonstrates that "formulas become collective cultural products because they successfully articulate a pattern of fantasy that is at least acceptable to if not preferred by the cultural groups who enjoy them" and "When a group's attitudes undergo some change, new formulas arise and existing formulas develop new themes and symbols …" (p. 34).

¹⁸ Fanny Burney, Evelina (New York: Norton, 1965), pp. 329 and 71; originally published 1778.

¹⁹ Rose Marie Cutting discusses Burney's women in some detail in "Defiant Women: the Growth of Feminism in Fanny Burney's Novels," Studies in English Literature, 17 (1977), see esp. pp. 521-23.

²⁰ "The idea of success has failed to engage the female imagination," Professor Spacks writes in Imagination, p. 409; also pp. 411, 413-14. In Imagining a Self (Cambridge: Harvard, 1976), she suggests that "female selffulfillment may demand the pursuit of other goals than happiness," p. 69. The question is whether the novels are limited as Watt (pp. 298-99) and Joyce and numerous others have argued or whether we are falling into the seductive trap of demanding that a writer imagine what never was (see Ruth Yeazell's "Fictional Heroines and Feminist Critics," Novel, 8 [1974], 35; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, "A Mirror for Men: Stereotypes of Women in Literature," Massachusetts Review, 13 [1972], 206-7). Cline-Naffziger's discussion of frustration suggests another reason: "Angry women have lost the ability to fantasize. They are unable to share their dreams because they have given up dreaming," p. 55.

²¹ Frances Brooke is probably indulging in the eighteenth-century's delight in knowing the "key" to The Rape of the Lock. Arabella Fermor, daughter of a prominent Catholic landowner, was familiar to London society and celebrated for her beauty. She seems to have been modest rather than ostentatious. The verses from The Celebrated Beauties describing her fit Mrs. Brooke's character well:

F-rm-r's a Pattern for the Beauteous Kind,
Compos'd to please, and ev'ry Way refin'd;
Obliging with Reserve, and Humbly Great,
Tho' Gay, yet Modest, tho' Sublime, yet Sweet;
Fair without Art, and graceful without Pride,
By Merit and Descent to deathless Fame ally'd.

The character in The History of Emily Montague engages in the somewhat outworn coquetry of Pope's Belinda. For a discussion of Arabella Fermor, see Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock and other Poems, Geoffrey Tillotson, ed. (London: Methuen, 1940), pp. 83-105 and 349-53.

²² John Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson, 1700-1739 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), pp. 123-26. See also J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 2nd ed. (1932; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1967), pp. 129-32; Spacks, Imagination, p. 402.

²³ Professor Spacks considers the nineteenth-century novel in Imagination, pp. 57, 66, 73, 77, 151, 295, and 380; she also notes the growing power of passivity.

²⁴ A major subject of Pierre Fauchery's La Destinée Féminine dans le roman européen du dix-huitième siècle, 1713-1807 is conventional endings and the literary and social factors which determined them (Paris: Colin, 1972). See also Miller, p. 43.

²⁵ Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: Oxford, 1970), p. 300; originally published 1752. For a discussion of the convention of fainting heroines, see Elizabeth MacAndrew and Susan Gorsky, "Why Do They Faint and Die?—The Birth of the Delicate Heroine," Journal of Popular Culture, 8 (1975), 735-43; Ilza Veith's Hysteria. The History of a Disease (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965) discusses fainting as a symptom of hysteria, pp. 121, 163-64.

²⁶ Jane Austen, Love and Freindship in The Works of Jane Austen, R. W. Chapman, ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), pp. vi, 102; see also pp. 86, 89 and 99-100 for incidents of fainting.

²⁷ Spacks, Imagining, p. 88; see also pp. 63-65.

²⁸ Ibid., pp. 57-58. Again, these are qualities associated with escape literature; see Cawelti, p. 36; Lesser, pp. 42-46, 104, and 115.

²⁹ This is not to say that some of the acts of violence in the novels by women are not simply conventional or the stuff of masochistic fancy. Within the escape literature of their day and within the conventions, the women novelists underscore feminine helplessness and dramatize feminine frustration over and over again. Were female violence simply convention, the outcome and the responses to situations would be less significant in the context of the books.

³⁰ Barker, Love Intrigues, p. 44.

³¹ Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), originally published in 1791, p. 164. Lloyd W. Brown argues that Jane Austen described similar illusory power in Lady Susan in "Jane Austen and the Feminist Tradition," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28 (1973), 321-38.

³² Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague (Ottawa: Graphic Publishers Limited, 1931), p. 198; originally published 1769.

³³ Moers argues that Emma's influence is her status as an heiress, p. 158. Austen condemns the scheming Susan with irony, p. 274, with satire, p. 282, and by her complete exclusion from society at the end of the story (Works, vi).

³⁴ Brooks, p. 160.

³⁵ Charlotte Lennox, The Life of Harriot Stuart (London: Payne and Bouquet, 1751), p. 8.

³⁶ Mary Collyer, Felicia to Charlotte (New York: Garland, 1974), Part I originally published in 1744 and Part II in 1749.

³⁷ John Dollard, et al., Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939), p. 1.

³⁸ Spacks in "Ev'ry Woman is at Heart a Rake," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8 (1974), 36, points out that "Passion lies within, the self is the ultimate enemy, the struggle is endless." Compare Braudy, "But Clarissa knows the truth of her frailty: weakness comes from within," p. 195.

³⁹ Lesser, pp. 265-66.

⁴⁰ Spacks, Imagining, pp. 59-60.

⁴¹ Collyer, pp. ii and 12.

⁴² The term appears in Valerie Shaw's "Jane Austen's Subdued Heroines," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 30 (1975), 284-85.

* I am grateful to the William Andrews Clark Library, UCLA, and to the American Philosophical Society for grants which made this research possible.