SOURCE: "Sarah Scott and The Sweet Excess of Paternal Love," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 32, No. 3, Summer, 1992, pp. 511-35.

In the essay below, Gonda examines the theme of father-daughter relationships in Scott's Agreeable Ugliness, a translation of La Place's La Laideur, as well as in Scott's own fiction.

You must take it well to be prun'd by so kind a Hand as that of a Father…. Some inward resistance there will be, where Power and not Choice maketh us move. But when a Father layeth aside his Authority, and persuadeth only by his Kindness, you will never answer it to Good Nature, if it hath not weight with you.¹

Introducing the collection Daughters and Fathers, editor Lynda E. Boose notes a "distressing scarcity of models of benevolent fatherhood" in myth and literature: "Tyrannical paternity seems to mar the father-daughter text even more conspicuously than that of...