By turns a poet, editor, translator, novelist, orator, and dramatist, Penelope Aubin zealously, and successfully, pursued the career of the complete Grub Street hack. Like many of her colleagues in the trade, she turned to writing primarily for financial reasons; but unlike most of her associates, who plied their pens in obscurity and were soon forgotten, she achieved some measure of popularity and even notoriety in her lifetime. Her success was the product of shrewdness rather than originality: she possessed the popular writer's knack for correctly gauging the reading public's current tastes, which in the 1720s ran to travel narratives such as Daniel Defoe's spectacularly successful Robinson Crusoe (1719) and to amatory tales such as Eliza Haywood's erotic-pathetic fantasies of persecuted innocence. Combining these two narrative strains, Aubin produced a series of fast-paced and undeniably appealing stories: pious romances celebrating the triumph of faith and virtue in a hostile...