The two novels of Thomas Amory are among the most eccentric narratives ever produced in an age renowned for its literary curiosities. Contemporary reviewers were at a loss to account for the bewildering proliferation of characters, scenes, and miscellaneous learning that confronted them in Amory's works; one commentator simply acknowledged the Memoirs: Containing the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755) to be "a book the most extraordinary in its way, we remember to have seen or heard of." Yet his novels attracted considerable critical attention, most notably the enthusiastic acclaim of the romantic critics William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. The classification of his works as novels in the eighteenth century suggests that readers in the period conceived of the genre in ways that differ radically from the current understanding of the form, an understanding conditioned by two intervening centuries of literary developments. Amory's novels thus...