Tobias Smollett

With Charlotte Lennox 's The Female Quixote as starting-point, this story follows a novel-reading heroine whose response to events and people in actual life is distorted by what she reads. It seems quite likely that...

Neither the Cumberland episode, nor her father's death, nor her own serious illness brought on by grief, can change Dorcasina. She next fancies that a new servant, John Brown, is a lover in disguise. (The...

SS had trouble securing a publisher for this novel. Because of this, Samuel Richardsonadvised her to try her Friends by a private Subscription, which turned out a success beyond her Hopes. Subscribers included...

AMS borrows from Richardson a masquerade scene and her basic epistolary form, and radically revises a borrowing from him when her heroine stabs a would-be rapist with scissors. But her general tone and her enjoyment...

The Critical Review dismissed the novel as nauseous and insipid, and the heroine as so inconsistent as to be incredible; its only reason for noticing it at all was to deter AMS from further publication...

In the house of an aunt she was surprised to find novels (particularly those of Richardson ) a topic of conversation, and that (in her own judgement) Fielding and Smollett , and various...

In her capacity as editor she made an exception to the paper's policy of publishing original poems only, for the sake of Wordsworth 's The Mad Mother, reprinted from Lyrical Ballads. She...

Again the sexual content was an issue. Devlin finds both reticence and modesty in EAR , but critics found the book's sexual candour appalling, or called it crude or [r]ather too full blooded, or...

The first elaborates the supposed history of its own production (written in Russian, translated into English, and edited by a series of writers, all said to be male). It is a novel of violent emotion...

MP's work was controversial from the beginning. It became the topic of newspaper paragraphs and of pamphlets. Several answers to it seem to have been written by Matthew Pilkington , and one answer to him...

Tobias Smollett , writing for the Critical in March 1760, took EN 's book as an attack on the obstetrician William Smellie (though Nihell specifically disavows reference to individuals). His notice is a defence of...

This time the Critical, probably again written by Smollett , employed an elaborate metaphor suggesting that EN 's pamphlet was a monstrous birth which the periodical itself had fathered: it warned her not to...

EN replied to the attack on her by Smollett , in a pamphlet entitled An Answer to the Author of the Critical Review for March 1760.

The first anecdote about the girls is sentimental in tone. The sweet and lovely Miss Menil reforms the eleven-year-old malicious telltale Miss Cummings by taking her part when she has done wrong. Miss Cummings, filled...

Writing to Mary Russell Mitford of her hope that they might meet, HM acknowledged the influence which the spirit of your writings has had over me. Her reading included Shakespeare , Smollett ...