The following essay discusses Sophia Lee and her sister, Harriet Lee.

When, in the notes to her novel Bélisaire (1808), Madame de Genlis complained that England had produced no historical romances, the Annual Review promptly rebutted the charge. "Madame Genlis is incorrect," the answer read, "in saying that we have no historical romances. Miss Lee's Recess is equal if not superior to any work of the kind which the French have produced." Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783, 1785) was the most popular and influential of the works produced by the sisters Sophia and Harriet Lee. Adept and respected writers in the sentimental manner of the 1780s and 1790s, Sophia and Harriet Lee responded, as did novelists like Charlotte Smith and Clara Reeve, to the growing English interest in the works of the French writer Prévost; the Lees pursued the vein of romantic adventure in novels and plays...