Penelope Aubin

PA began publishing early in the eighteenth century. She is chiefly known for her short novels, though she turned her hand to poetry and comedy as well. At the height of her career her rate of production was equalled only by Defoe and Haywood , and her novels continued to be reprinted throughout the eighteenth century, in Ireland and the USA as well as England. Her fictional plots range the world and are crammed with adventures. Much under-age sex and violence (often both together) cluster at the margins of her stories, while her central characters preserve their virtue (often female Christian virtue resisting the lust of a man from a different culture), and moralistic High Tory principles are upheld.