SOURCE: Editor's Introduction, in The History of Emily Montague, edited by Mary Jane Edwards, CEECT edition, Carleton University Press, 1985, pp. xvii-lxxi.

In the following excerpt, Edwards examines the literary, biographical, and historical contexts of The History of Emily Montague.

[The History of Emily Montague] was typical of much eighteenth-century English literature. Its references to classical literature and mythology, and to the Chinese, Tartars, Turks, sultans, seraglios, and nabobs, and its quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, and more recent English and French writers placed it squarely in the context of the eighteenth-century literary tradition. Its title linked it to the eighteenth-century vogue for both history and biography, genres in which Mrs. Brooke herself also worked during the course of her career; its journey motifs, to much popular travel literature. Its pairing of such character opposites as the coquette and the woman of sensibility, the rake and the man...