"I cannot be patient, I cannot be passive, when my virtue is in danger."

Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, alone and unprotected, is relentlessly pursued by her dead mistress's son. Although she is attracted to young Mr B., she holds out against his demands and threats of abduction and rape, determined to defend her virginity and abide by her own moral standards. Psychologically acute in its investigations of sex, freedom and power, Richardson's first novel caused a sensation when it was first published, with its depiction of a servant heroine who dares to assert herself. Richly...

Leaving the secluded home of her guardian for the first time, beautiful Evelina Anville is captivated by her new surroundings in London's beau monde--and in particular by the handsome, chivalrous Lord Orville. But her enjoyment soon turns to mortification at the hands of her vulgar and capricious grandmother, and the rakish Sir Clement Willoughby, who torments the naive young woman with his unwanted advances. And while her aristocratic father refuses to acknowledge her legitimacy, Evelina can hold no hope of happiness with the man she loves.

Published anonymously in 1778, Frances Burney's...

Since its publication in 1908, Anne of Green Gables has been a continuous international best-seller, enjoying successful television adaptations on PBS and The Disney Channel, and captivating children and adults alike with the irresistible charms of its remarkable heroine, Anne Shirley. This wildly imaginative, red-headed chatterbox tries to fit into the narrow confines of Victorian expectations, but her exuberant spirit keeps leaping delightfully beyond the bounds. Indeed, when Maud Montgomery decided to reject the sermonizing formulas of the children's books of her day, she brought...

Treating Frances Burney (1752-1840) with the seriousness usually reserved for later novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Margaret Anne Doody combines biographical narrative with informed literary criticism as she analyses not only Burney's published novels, but her plays, fragments of novels, poems, and other works never published.

Twentieth-century historians and critics defending the novel have emphasized its role as superseding something else, as a sort of legitimate usurper that deposed the Epic, a replacement of myth, or religious narrative. To say that the Age of Early Christianity was really also the Age of the Novel rumples such historical tidiness--but so it was. From the outset of her discussion, Doody rejects the conventional Anglo-Saxon distinction between Romance and Novel. This eighteenth-century distinction, she maintains, served both to keep the foreign--dark-skinned peoples, strange speakers,...

The Daring Muse is a challenging account of the richness and complexity of Augustan poetry.

Treating Frances Burney (1752 1840) with the seriousness usually reserved for later novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Margaret Anne Doody combines biographical narrative with informed literary criticism as she analyzes not only Burney's published novels, but her plays, fragments of novels, poems, and other works never published. Doody also draws upon a mine of letters and diaries for detailed and sometimes surprising biographical information. Burney's feelings and emotions forcefully emerge in her sophisticated and complex late novels, Camilla and The Wanderer. Her novels...