Henry Fielding

The protagonist's name had been used by both Richardson (in Clarissa) and Henry Fielding (in Tom Jones) as a kind of generic appellation for a specific maid or young woman of the servant...

Selima is a writing heroine: her poems are interspersed in the text, since as she says, As I grow sick or unhappy, I grow poetical. By midway in the last volume she is...

Her first chapter explicitly addresses critics, and the authorial voice is often in dialogue with imagined readers—who are given a kind of life as typical young eligibles: the lovely Florinda and her favoured swain.AL

As its title implies, this novel sets out to flout fictional convention in its bourgeois attitudes and ineligible characters. For both preface and narrative RH adopts the persona of the ugly Old Bachelor, Gilbert Grubthorpe...

The title-page bears a quotation from Prior 's verse romance Henry and Emma, but SS lays explicit claim, too, to a canonical tradition of prose fiction. The book begins with a series of tales...

In her paratexts EP addresses the reader as he and (somewhat familiarly, in the style of Henry Fielding ) as thou. The preface takes a playfully insulting tone with readers. She tells them they...

After seven pages on grammar, she offers pattern letters: those in verse are in effect an anthology of epistolary poems by women, a patriotically generous selection of Irish writers (Mary Monck , Mary Barber

Jane Oakwood says (presumably standing in for her author, as she often does) that in youth she was accused of imitating Juliet, Lady Catesby (Frances Brooke 's translation from Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni ).

RB 's satire here embraces the publishing industry and its pandering to readers' tastes. Emma's cousin Lesbia is apparently representative of a particular type of circulating-library reader; much to Emma's mortification, she likes Miching Mallecho...

Ormond, a young man seeking a role-model, turns at first to Fielding 's Tom Jones, but later and more laudably to Richardson 's Sir Charles Grandison.

Some reviewers (who saw the novel as domestic rather than political) were not enthusiastic; the Critical claimed in a lengthy notice to be disappointed in almost every respect with this performance, and deplored the example...

The editor of MC 's travel account, Alexander Fergusson , did not think much of her novel; he wrote that it scarcely fulfilled expectations.He thought that many of her characters and episodes, though...

The Critical Review (in January 1804) noted the catchpenny appeal of the title to devotees of the gothic: in these days when ghosts and mysteries are so fashionable. It thought, however, that this novel told...

The Critical belatedly noted: She is now no longer in partnership, but sets up for herself. It approved the novel's morally didactic tone, its style, characters, and narrative, but warned that it...

The Critical Review (besides alleging indebtedness to Henry Fielding ) judged that both characters and story were well done, but that the ending was wildly improbable. The Anti-Jacobin notice was prefaced by...