The passage of time has not been kind to the author of Luck at Last; or, The Happy Unfortunate. Were it not for his connection with the royal colony of Virginia as master of the grammar school in the College of William and Mary, his very identity would be unknown today. The obscurity into which Blackamore's writings have fallen is not entirely accidental; his novels display little of the stylistic verve and lubricious appeal that so largely contributed to the success of his contemporaries Aphra Behn, Eliza Hayward, and Delariviére Manley. Nonetheless, he has earned a secure place in the history of the eighteenth-century novel because his fictions anticipate in many significant ways the great novels of the 1740s, and also because they expose in the clearest outlines what John J. Richetti calls the "ideology" of the early novel: the unconsciously shared body of assumptions, attitudes...