The hero and heroine survive an impossible concatenation of wicked attempts to make them miserable, to arrive at last at perfect (and well-funded) happiness. But the novel has remarkable aspects. In a systematic role-reversal, two...
Literary responses
Mrs F. C. Patrick
Recent critics April London
and Shareen Robinson
have concentrated on the novel's political message; Robinson also notes that the story shifts from the domestic to the public sphere.
London, April. “Clock Time and Utopia’s Time in Novels of the 1790s”. Studies in English Literature, Vol.
40
, No. 3, 1 June 2000– 2024, pp. 539-60.
Robinson, Shareen. “Heroines in a Revolutionary World, 1790-1800”. British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) Conference, Oxford, Jan. 2003.
Literary responses
Margaret Minifie
At this point MM
lost the support of the Critical Review. It pronounced this novel one of the most uninteresting we ever perused.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
London, April. “Avoiding the Subject: The Presence and Absence of Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel”. The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, edited by Linda E. Merians, University Press of Kentucky, 1996, pp. 213-27.
London, April. “Clock Time and Utopia’s Time in Novels of the 1790s”. Studies in English Literature, Vol.
40
, No. 3, pp. 539-60.
London, April. Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge University Press, 1999.