SOURCE: "Henry Fielding, and 'the Dreadful Sin of Incest'," in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 1, Fall, 1979, pp. 6-18.

In the excerpt below, Battestin examines the theme of incest between brother and sister in the works of Sarah Fielding and her brother Henry.

… As with the process of artistic creation in general, the making of a play or a novel entails the making of choices—the choice of theme, of genre, of characters and setting, of the shape of an action, of a style and tone and attitude. And choices, whether deliberate or unconsciously motivated, are personal things. We may therefore find it significant that as an author—and particularly as a comic author—[Henry] Fielding's use of the incest motif is distinctive in the period from, say, 1700 to 1765. As far as I am aware, Moll Flanders (1722) is the only earlier novel in which incest figures, and...