Books in the Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women series

Written for the very audience it portrays, ""The Excursion"" introduces the heroine, Maria Villiers, to London's ""gentle"" society and its glittering pastimes. Brooke drew upon the English courtship novel in the tradition of Elize Haywood and Henry Fielding for her novel's plot structure.

Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) was one of the first women in England to earn a living writing fiction.

Actress, playwright, and novelist, Elizabeth Griffith (1727-1793) won fame in England with the publication in 1757 of the first two volumes of Letters Between Henry and Frances, letters from her own courtship with Richard Griffith whom she secretly married in 1751.

First published in an era when most novels about young women concentrated on courtship and ended with marriage, The Recess daringly portrays women involved in political intrigues, overseas journeys, and even warfare.

These publications and the politicians they influenced pursued a fundamental realignment of US foreign policy that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan.

The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, originally published as three volumes in 1753, is the last work by the prolific English novelist Eliza Haywood. Out of print since the early nineteenth century and never available in an edited and fully-annotated modern edition such as this, Haywood's novel is an important early example of the sentimental novel of domestic manners. In its depiction of marriage and courtship among the leisure class of the mid-eighteenth century, Haywood's novel is remarkable for its unsentimental realism.

Published in 1754 in five parts and divided into three volumes, The Cry stands as one of the most distinctive and intriguing works by women during the florescence of their writing in eighteenth-century England.

The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Sarah Fielding's first and most celebrated novel, went through several editions, the second of which was heavily revised by her brother Henry. In recounting the guileless hero's search for a true friend, the novel depicts the derision with which almost everyone treats his sentimental attitudes to human nature.

In The Young Philosopher, George Delmont embraces an agrarian life and devotes himself to the pursuit of knowledge.

Camp Nelson, Kentucky, was designed in 1863 as a military supply depot for the Union Army. Later it became one of the country's most important recruiting stations and training camps for black soldiers and Kentucky's chief center for issuing emancipation papers to former slaves.

A pioneer in the tradition of English women's fiction, Charlotte Lennox was valued friend to both Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson and a major influence on Jane Austen. The heroine of Charlotte Lennox's Henrietta is a young Englishwoman who resists her aunt's pressure to convert to Catholicism and is set adrift in London society. But unlike many of her passive, vulnerable contemporaries in fiction, the admirable Henrietta makes her way in the world relying on her own cleverness, conviction, and wit. This groundbreaking work of satire and human folly is republished here in a fully annotated modern edition.