CT 's father, the Rev. Edward Talbot, one of eight sons of a bishop, and himself an archdeacon, died of smallpox in a notorious epidemic on 9 December 1720, five months before she was born.

Newspapers reported the royal plan for an experiment as to the safety of inoculation against smallpox, to be conducted on inmates of Newgate Prison in London.

Charles Maitland , under the patronage of Princess Caroline , experimentally inoculated six Newgate prisoners (three of each sex) against smallpox.

It was not aimed at smallpox (though that was in the headlines) but at the plague, which was much feared as an import from Europe.

The first alleged death from smallpox inoculation followed by only four days the inoculation of two royal princesses (daughters of Princess Caroline ).

Massey argued that smallpox, like other troubles, was sent by God either to test or to punish. Therefore, inoculation would be trespassing on God's prerogative; the first inoculator was Satan when he struck Job with boils.

Like Elizabeth Cellier , Nihell claims authority for women from ancient history. It was probably Eve, she says, not Adam, who delivered the first human babies. The mother of Socrates was a midwife, and inoculation for smallpox was a female invention. Midwives know enough anatomy for their purposes, though they need training from their youth in the female art of touching or internal examination. They preserve women's modesty and understand that a midwife needs patience while a woman in labour needs to be cherished, comforted, inheartened. Many of her central points have particular resonance for later feminists: Art should aim at imitating Nature.Mothers can speak for themselves—though, she adds, children cannot. Women must assume liberty enough of mind to shake off the dangerous yoke of masculinist thinking; they must cease to be the dupes . . . of that scientific jargon, employed to throw its learned dust in their eyes.

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.

The Delicate Distress charts the direction for all EG 's three novels: it shows a wife suffering emotional distress and behaving impeccably. Emily, Lady Woodville, the novel's sentimental centre, exchanges letters with her elder sister, Fanny, Lady Straffon (a wise and loving counsellor to a wide circle), about her anxiety when her husband's former mistress, a worthless marchioness, reappears in their lives and shows every sign of luring him into adulterous love. A whole series of subordinate and inset plots anatomise the various levels of happy and unhappy marriage, for purposes of comparison. In the end Lady Woodville's unwavering goodness and her refusal to blame her husband win him back. Social topics debated among the characters include philosophy, comparison of male with female friendship, the question whether ladies, in general, wrote better, in the epistolary stile, than men, the question of inoculation against smallpox (women, it seems, need immense courage to face inoculating either their children or themselves, while men need to be protected by ignorance of the whole matter), and what a virtuous woman ought to do if she ceases to love her husband. Inset stories include the particularly moving one of Charlotte Beauchamp, who entered a convent after her lover Lord Seymour killed her brother in a duel: Lucy and I, read, and wept, by turns—When one of us began to falter, the other endeavoured to relieve her; but there were many passages, that neither of us could repeat aloud, and only gazed silently on, through the dim medium of our tears.

OG survived a bout of smallpox as a child, and was left deeply scarred.

At some time during her youth she suffered from a bout of smallpox which left her badly marked.

The heroine, Fanny Warley, is supposed dead but survives, is supposed poor but turns out to be the daughter of Lady and Sir James Powis and therefore rich; she has smallpox but keeps her beauty. One character is strikingly delicate, which is necessary to the plotting. The abbey and its gardens are presented as a modern-day paradise. The hero is a Lord Darcey, and his marriage to Fanny is accompanied at the end with that of Elizabeth Delves to the only other eligible bachelor in the story (also a lord).

Mr Tudor in this text is of course based on AT 's husband Philip . He first appears as the husband of Lady Elizabeth, who was as remarkable for his sense and penetration, as he was for every amiable quality that can do honour to a man. Volume two opens with Lady Elizabeth bearing a son and dying a few months later. Her widower's marriage to Euterpe is somewhat clumsily handled: Euterpe feels for the motherless baby a tenderness which she ever after evinced when he became her son-in-law [i.e. stepson]; but little did she then think that such an event would ever take place! After Euterpe marries Mr Tudor the novel calls her, consistently, Mrs Tudor, and the first topic is the way she cherishes her stepchildren, making no difference between them and her own. This slides naturally into one of AT 's favourite topics: that of the importance of education in shaping the moral life. This volume has minimal plot: the Tudors' first cottage is described in detail, together with the hospitality they exercise there on several occasions. Euterpe gives free rein to her theatrical talent in her domestic life, staging a pastoral mode of leisure activity in which the elder step-daughter, the maid, a lamb and a cow each has a role to play. Other people's lives are discussed and critiqued. The Tudors travel with their three daughters to France, where the two eldest are left at a convent to perfect their French. There the younger falls dangerously ill with smallpox and the elder increases in religious fervour to the extent of choosing to become a nun. This part of the narrative is supplemented by Mrs Tudor's letters from abroad; the closing pages are occupied with an anecdote about the sagacity of a dog.

Carolan was born in 1670, and blinded by smallpox at the age of eighteen. His musical style blends the baroque (modern) with the ancient. Mary Delany was one of his patrons.

This is a story of contrasted sisters, told by an omniscient narrator. Julia Woodville is good while her sister Ellen is haughty and supercilious. Nearly sixteen years before the novel began, their father retired disgusted from court life to the country (a broken-down house near Kendal) with his wife and two daughters. (Another daughter and a son have died from smallpox.) He has a rake's progress behind him, and his wife, once the good orphan Miss Neville, has participated in his return to dissipation and is, unfortunately, a keen novel-reader. The story ends with the expected distribution of rewards and punishments.

The year after her father died, the child Anna or Anne Riggs was dangerously ill with smallpox.

He was never healthy; the trouble was diagnosed as being in his brain. His mother feared he had been marked by the circumstances of her pregnancy (beset by financial worries and disappointed of any inheritance from her uncle). A couple of years later (after Ralph had undergone inoculation for smallpox, with all the aggressive preparation and follow-up which were currently believed in) her fears became more sinister: This poor unfortunate Child will dye at last . . . . What shall I do? What can I do? has the flattery of my Friends made me too proud of my own Brains? & must these poor Children suffer for my crime? Soon after this Ralph died, at twenty months old. Hester Thrale was left a prey to terror whenever one of her children had a headache. Her next baby, Frances Ann, was born two months before Ralph's death and died in a flu epidemic five months after it.

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.

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

Mary Eleanor had a precocious flirtation, at thirteen, with the fifteen-year-old Campbell Scott, younger brother of a duke. When Scott left school to go into the army, the pair exchanged rings, but soon afterwards he died of smallpox. After him came a string of admirers, one of them a young Italian marchese.

In this book the ancient and imposing but crumbling manor house is an emblem of English society as a whole: a trope which was to be popular with later novelists. The downtrodden orphan heroine, Monimia, works as a servant, and is painfully humble and submissive; nevertheless the book depicts her education and vindication. CS satirises the pretensions of her own sex through the would-be erudite Miss Hollybourn and the literary Mrs Manby, who is given to stealing from other authors, uses cosmetics to disguise the ravages of smallpox, and believes in the teeth of the evidence that she is still attractive to men. (Anna Seward thought Mrs Manby to be based on Hannah More ; others have suggested Hannah Cowley .) Perhaps most interesting character is the unsympathetic, powerful, problematic Mrs Rayland, a Queen Elizabeth in private life, who holds the protagonists' inheritance in her grasp. The hero, Orlando Somerive, has a drunken, gambling spendthrift of an elder brother whose father cannot control him, very much in the style of Smith's own husband. Orlando travels with the British army to America; scenes there feature idealised liberty and his friendship or brotherhood with a native American. New York State is given a lush, tropical landscape, in which Orlando is taken captive and begins to write poetry. During his absence Monimia is subjected to emotional harassment and attempted rape; her happy ending leaves her contentedly dependent on Orlando's protection.