Though Frances Brooke dreamed of becoming a celebrated dramatist, she is remembered today almost exclusively as a novelist. In this and several other respects, her career closely resembles that of the earlier eighteenth-century novelist Mary Davys. Like Davys, Brooke struggled for recognition as a woman writer, exploring narrative patterns familiar to her predecessor, such as the social formation of a lively, assertive young woman in The Excursion (1777)--a subject previously explored in Davys's Reform'd Coquet (1724). The differences between the two novelists, however, are perhaps more significant than their similarities; even the most cursory comparison of the two authors reveals a self-confidence and sophistication in Brooke's novels that fairly eclipses Davys's narratives. Brooke's superior success as a novelist has been attributed by some critics to the intervening influence of Samuel Richardson, but her achievement must also be seen as a measure of the growing self-confidence of women writers in...