Tobias Smollett

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...

In the Monthly Review, Ralph Griffiths passed a judgement which was inflected against Betsy Thoughtless by issues of gender. He guessed that the author was female because of the novel's attention to matters of...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

The day was spent travelling from Glasgow to Inveraray. The writer throws in quotations and allusions (Edward Young , the Bible, Macpherson 's Ossian and Homer 's Odyssey, Sterne and Smollett

This preface is headed by two Latin words (one with a faulty grammatical ending) from Ovid 's description of chaos. SG slams both male and female novelists, chiefly authors of gothic or horrid novels and...

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...

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 ).

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...

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...

MD 's second brother, Alexander , must be the one who was said to be the only member of her family not to oppose her becoming a Quaker preacher. Alexander set off in May...

This most sensational trial of the mid-century was reported in detail by the Gentleman's Magazine the following year, and used in more or less avowed fictions by Eliza Haywood in Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young...

GE 's father, Scottish barrister Hugh or Hew Dalrymple , had been a lieutenant in the British army, but took up the law about the time Grissel was born. He was said to have made...