The title-page bears a quotation from Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's Love about a fiend with the appearance of an angel beautiful and bright. In the novel, set in Ireland, politics are a constant background presence, but personal relations are the centre. The opening scene of guests arriving at a social gathering offers FMR the chance to introduce and describe most of her cast of characters. They include both members of parliament and agitators, both Irish nationalists and those who believe that Ireland can never be a nation. Questions like Home Rule, and the plunge in the value of Irish produce in the face of imports from all around Europe: such questions shape the context of the story, while the narrative centres on friendships and courtships. The angel/fiend of the Coleridge quotation is Elinor Fetherston, a dazzlingly beautiful young woman from a large family, who has debts and needs to marry, who has ambitions and needs to charm and conquer. Her female foil is the grey-eyed Stella Considine, who has strong political opinions (she cannot abide a landlord) and a beautiful singing voice, and is solving her own money problems by teaching music, with a secret elation at her own earning power. Among a network of male characters two stand out. Richard Talbot is gloomy, dignified, and restrained in manner, once very handsome but now grotesquely marked by smallpox, an able man who grasps political intricacies and makes up his mind in an instant, a man of whom strangers are afraid. Titus Orr, his foil, is a broad, compact young man, a personage to love and trust at first sight, who sees the complexities of political issues and hesitates before them, unable to decide for want of power to see the future.

LP survived smallpox as a small child.

Mary Sidney's mother, the former Lady Mary Dudley , came from a powerful family. Her brothers, all players on the national scene, included Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. She lost her beauty by smallpox when her daughter Mary was a toddler.

It was advertised as intended for the younger and politer Sort of Ladies, though the reader is conventionally referred to as he. Advertising and other publicity was on a larger scale than for any other of Haywood's works. It ran for two years: twenty-four numbers. Publishing anonymously, EH claimed to chair a committee of women: several members of one body, of which I am the mouth. Doubt that this could really be women's writing is voiced more than once, over the name of male correspondents. A frontispiece depicts the authors gathered at a tea-table (the sign of Fame visible behind them in the top of the picture). The editor is a sober, middle-aged woman who was a coquette in her youth. Others in the club include Mira, a society widow (wearing black in the illustration), and Euphrosine, a merchant's daughter who after losing her beauty to smallpox (as Samuel Johnson 's Victoria does in a fiction of a few years later) has acquired intellectual interests (thereby allowing her sister to take over the role of their mother's favourite).

The opening scene identifies the heroine, Elizabeth Neville, then not yet sixteen, as a virtuous woman: she is first seen walking (together with the parson's two sons, Charles and Henry Willoughby) behind the coffin of a faithful domestic who had worked for her recently-deceased grandmother at her manor house (in a village six miles from Durham) and has died of smallpox. Elizabeth is contrasted with her mother, Lady Neville, and her younger sister, who are coincidentally approaching in a splendid carriage, accompanied by a number of out-riders in gay and costly liveries. Lady Neville expresses snobbish horror at her daughter publicly mourning a low person in low company: she and her younger daughter, Fanny, are also selfishly frightened of catching smallpox. Only an uncle, General Sir Charles Neville, jumps down to join the funeral party. He had once wished to marry into the Willoughby family, and has cause to abhor the stiff-necked family pride of his own. Over the course of a long story, however, the values of Elizabeth and Sir Charles prevail The novel ends with the marriages of Elizabeth and Fanny to Charles and Henry Willoughby, for Fanny has repented her selfishness and been reclaimed for the domestic virtues. Her redemption comes about even though as a girl in the West Indies (where her father was Governor of an island) she had caused the death of a slave, Juba, whom she had commanded to dive into the sea and retrieve a whip. Juba is killed by a sea-monster, which Fanny's Newfoundland dog must have sensed when he broke his habit of obedience and refused to retrieve the whip. The incident closed horribly with the dog retrieving the mangled remains of the slave. In the end good examples work more strongly on Fanny than this awful warning.

Elizabeth Robinson (later EM ) was sent away from home to protect her from catching smallpox from her sister, Sarah .

AA 's daughter from her second marriage, Sarah Camm, died of smallpox, at eleven days short of her ninth birthday.

An anonymous doctor was credited in IB 's preface with the authorship of both The Rearing and Management of Children, and Diseases of Infancy and Childhood and the medical chapter. The former chapter supports maternal breastfeeding and smallpox vaccination, now made mandatory by the state, and focuses on infant physiology, development, and illnesses, rather than all aspects of childrearing.The Doctor contains numerous treatments and remedies for common illnesses such as cholera, even including instructions on how to bleed a patient in an apoplectic emergency if a doctor is unobtainable. Other portions of the Book of Household Management also touch on medical matters, such as the section on Invalid Cookery, the discussions of the duties of nurses and wet nurses, and the general emphasis on sanitation. In her discussion of nursemaids, IB quotes Florence Nightingale 's Notes on Nursing in support of good hygeine, nutrition, and fresh air. The legal chapter, contributed by a lawyer, is short and mostly matter-of-fact, summarizing the practical aspects of such matters as leases, debts, wills, and the legal status of women. Unlike the bulk of the book, it assumes a male rather than a female reader.

Catharine Macaulay , she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.She makes no critical comment on the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (Mrs Godwin), for whom her sources were contemporary magazines, but refuses to criticise her actions. She calls her [t]his singular woman and writes matter-of-factly: [u]ncomfortable at home, she left it. (Since MMB had done the same, she would not be likely to disapprove.) With equal matter-of-factness she identifies Eliza Haywood 's latter and best works. She is discreet about Mary Robinson and spiritedly defends Sappho against imputations with which her memory is loaded and which may be due, she says, to the malice of Ovid . (On the other hand she swallows whole the story of Sappho choosing to die for love of Phaon). She is a brisk, effective critic and historian. Jane Shore she sums up as famous for her Beauty, Wit, Misfortunes, and Penitence. The characteristics of Susanna Centlivre 's plays are bustle, spirit, and plot. Macaulay's history is a violent attack on the whole race of the Stuarts. Mention of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu causes her to compute the number of lives so far saved by smallpox inoculation at 139,652. She effectively marshals her scholarly arguments to maintain that Dorothy, Lady Pakington , was the real author of The Whole Duty of Man.

She survived a bout of smallpox in her youth which left her somewhat marked.

MB 's mother had married her father on the rebound, and they were incompatible by temperament, although both equally opinionated, forthright, and tactless. Bertie found early in the marriage that Charles had gambled away the joint savings they were setting aside for a house. They had constant acrimonious quarrels about money until he allowed her to take control of his salary, allotting him only a little pocket money. After this they found other things to quarrel about. Charles had an affair when Muriel was still a baby, and after this the couple became sexually estranged. On one occasion Charles Baker was goaded to hit Bertie, then slammed out of the house, leaving her to sing lugubrious hymns all day. One of the rare things they agreed on was going through the rigmarole of conscientious objection so that their children did not have to be vaccinated against smallpox.

It tells the story of a rich heiress who takes in and refines a beautiful London flower-seller. In present-day Kent on the Castle estate of her ancient aristocratic family, Lady Lucille Ingleshaw, aged seventeen, encounters squalid, nameless poverty in the form of a beautiful, emaciated girl of her own age, whom she finds sleeping exhaustedly in the grounds and takes home to nurse. The servants are horrified. One calls the girl, who knows herself only as Bess, offal. The governess clearly thinks she is either a fallen woman or worse. She tries to prevent contact between the two, exclaiming, in what readers would have recognized as an allusion to the legislation of prostitution through the Contagious Diseases Acts: She may have some contagious disease—smallpox, perhaps. Her protégée does indeed transmit scarlet fever to Lady Lucille (who almost dies from it), but she is, as in Shaw 's Pygmalion, cleaned up, renamed Elizabeth May, and installed in the house in the shifting role of servant, pupil, nurse, and companion to her rescuer. When a maid offers herself as a model, the sharp-witted (and we later learn, Radical) Elizabeth retorts You're the pattern I'm to cut myself out upon? I'd rather look higher, and imitate Lady Lucille.

These prose writings, predominantly religious in tone, are like Jane Cavendish 's writings almost all connected with family. Here, however, the family is not a network of individuals wielding power in the social sphere, but a succession of babies prone to illness and, all too frequently, to death. Lady Bridgewater writes frequently and eloquently about pregnancy, labour, child illnesses, and child death, in a collection amounting, as Travitsky argues, to a kind of autobiography of her own most challenging experiences. Perhaps the collection most like this one from the period was written by Mary Carey , who took the opposite side from Lady Bridgewater in the English Civil War, but shared with her the experience of striving for a properly pious response to God's taking away her children. Lady Bridgewater's titles are self-explanatory. A Prayer when I was with Child is a title used for several prayers, one of which thanks God for the blessing of her son and daughter who lived long enough to be christened, and beseeches: when I come to the cruell grones of labour, in this my travaile giue me patience. A late example is entitled, as if she now needs to be more careful over distinguishing them, A Prayer when I was with Child of Stuart. A Prayer in time of Labour calls that time this height of paine.A Prayer after I was brought to Bed says thou art ever mercyfull and hast brought us at this time from many and great dangers, and me from the great torture of Childbirth. Other speaking titles include A Prayer when I continued wth [sic] Child, after I thought I should have fallen in Labour (a tiny narrative), Upon occasion of the death of my Boy Henry (who died at twenty-nine days when his mother was twenty-nine years old: she prays that she may avoid wishing he had never been born), and When I lost my Deare Girle Kate (who died of smallpox at twenty-two months, a promising child, much loved by her brothers and sister, who would make her mind knowne at any time, & was kind to all, even to Strangers, & had no Anger in her). Two more poems on Kate follow.

Number 128, 12 June 1755, follows Jane Collier 's fairly recent Art of Tormenting in discussing mental cruelty in marriage; it advises husbands to use some caution, since a wife can die of a broken heart; and the misfortune is, that there is no tormenting a dead wife. In no. 130, on 26 June, Priscilla Cross-Stitch, one of three old maids living together, uses the magazine as a medium tactfully to inform their male servant that they dislike his tight nankeen breeches. No. 143 (25 September) quotes Anne Finch 's truly original poem, called the Spleen, which pleases me more than almost any thing I have read. No. 144 (2 October) turns on a sixteen-year-old girl's seduction by a man posing as financial saviour, and captures the differing attitudes of all those concerned. A daughter of the seducer writes, I dare not indulge my pity for her as I would, lest it should lead me to think too hardly of one, whom I am bound in duty to reverence and honour. In no. 145 (9 October), a woman writes about a suitor who remained faithful even when her beauty was ruined by smallpox, but deserted her in a flash when her father lost his fortune.

Gilbert Burnet's second marriage, in late May 1687 to Mary Scott , was also a love match (though she was rich). She died of smallpox on 18 June 1698, having borne seven children during her eleven years of marriage, and lost two of them (both sons) to death.

MC 's brother, another James Steuart , was educated at school and university and on the Grand Tour. He married Lady Frances Wemyss in 1743, and two years later, because she was ill with smallpox, did not (like more cautious propertied men) leave Edinburgh when Prince Charles, the Young Pretender , had occupied the city and established his court there. The result was that after the second Jacobite Rebellion Sir James was excluded from the Bill of Indemnity (though he insisted that he would never have taken up arms against the Hanoverian line). Standing accused of high treason and having left Britain, he was unable to return with safety. He and his wife and son became exiles abroad. Sir James studied political economy and published a book that became important to David Hume among others: An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, 1770. He and his wife became close friends of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , who addressed to them some of the finest of her late letters.

LAC , along with her daughter Margaret, was ill with smallpox during her husband's last illness, and they were both unable to visit him. Although she survived the illness, it permanently scarred her face.

Unspecified illnesses coming one after another kept her housebound for years. Passages in her poems suggest that she was disabled in some way and possibly disfigured (by, for instance, smallpox).

The story enforces the view that love comes but once in a lifetime (like smallpox, commented the Critical Review). Having lost her only love, the heroine is doomed to remain forever in the cloister.

Curll was apprenticed sometime around 1697 to 1699, and set up in business for himself by early 1706. He became a particularly agile entrepreneur with a nose for new market niches and an absence of moral scruple. He also held auctions of books, sold patent medicines at his shop, and published works on smallpox and venereal disease. He was known for publishing pornography (often misogynist), inaccurate statements, deliberately false attributions, and material acquired against the wishes of the author. He also published religious works, and respectable authors like the poet Matthew Prior ; but it was probably his perception of the publicity value of female names which led him to publish work by a number of serious women writers, like Jane Barker , Susanna Centlivre , the mysterious, Irish Sarah Butler , and (without authority) the pious Elizabeth Singer Rowe . His recent biographers call him an eccentric outsider in the world of publishing.

LED marked the death from smallpox of her elder grandson with Sions Lamentation, Lord Henry Hastings , His Funerals Blessing.

QEI suffered an attack of smallpox which she barely survived. The question of the succession loomed, and Burghley actually wrote a memo instructing the Privy Council , in the event of her death, to appoint the next monarch.

After being brought up in the Herbert family, Lady Mary Villiers was given away (not yet in her teens) in a dynastic marriage, celebrated with great pomp on 8 January 1635, to Charles, Lord Herbert (grandson of the Countess of Pembroke , the poet). He was then sent off to complete his education by travelling in Europe, and died of smallpox in January 1636.

Soon after the women's imprisonment they were so badly stung by mosquitoes while asleep at night that their faces became as unrecognisably swollen as if they had smallpox. Their health suffered severely from other factors, such as heat and hunger-strikes, and each one was several times near death.