SOURCE: The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Basil Blackwell, 1986, 225 p.

In the first part of the following excerpt, Spencer discusses how the financial and emotional dependence of women novelists in the mid-eighteenth century on male patrons thwarted their willingness to challenge existing sexual hierarchies. In the second part of the excerpt, Spencer examines Fielding's The Countess of Dellwyn in relation to changing attitudes toward adultery and seduction in the mid-eighteenth century.

The Terms of Acceptance: Richardson and Fielding: Two Traditions in the Novel

… For women novelists, the debate centred on [Samuel] Richardson's and [Henry] Fielding's work was important because it not only divided the novel tradition into two distinct strands, but sexualized the division. Fielding's fiction was clearly masculine, Richardson's feminine, in eighteenth-century terms. Expounding his theory of the novel as 'comic-Epic-Poem in Prose',⁴⁵ Fielding gave the new form legitimacy by claiming...