4
Nobody's Credit
Fiction, Gender, and Authorial Property in the Career of Charlotte Lennox

Charlotte Lennox's first novel appeared in 1750.^[1] Although it drew on episodes in the author's life and its title, The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself , feigned autobiography, the book made few serious demands on the public's credit; in the main,^[2] it was obviously nobody's story, just an innocent female fiction. By mid-century, innocence had, at least ostensibly, become a hallmark of women's writing, one intimately connected both with the nonreferential, hence nonscandalous, "pure" fiction they supposedly produced, and with the nonlibidinous, sexually passive "nature" they newly claimed.

We might interpret the Ivy Lane Club's "whole night of festivity" (initiated by Samuel Johnson and recorded by Sir John Hawkins) to greet "the birth of Mrs. Lenox's first literary child" as a celebration of the innocence of the new representative woman writer, or literary lady:^[3]

The place appointed was the Devil tavern, and there, about the hour of eight, Mrs. Lenox and her husband, and a lady of her acquantance [sic ], now living, as also the [Ivy Lane] club, and friends to the number of twenty, assembled. Our supper was elegant, and Johnson had directed that a magnificent hot apple-pye should make a part of it, and this he would have stuck with bay-leaves, because, forsooth, Mrs. Lenox was an authoress, and had written verses; and further,

[1] The date on the title page of The Life of Harriot Stuart is 1751, but December 1750 seems to have been its actual date of publication. See Miriam Rossiter Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth Century Lady of Letters (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1935), p. 10 n. 38.

[2] The novel contained one scandalous segment attacking the character of Lady Isabella Finch, Lennox's former patroness.

[3] The phrase, purportedly Samuel Johnson's, is reported in Sir John Hawkins, The Works of Samuel Johnson , quoted in Small, p. 10.

he had prepared for her a crown of laurel, with which, but not till he had invoked the muses by some ceremonies of his own invention, he encircled her brows. The night passed, as must be imagined, in pleasant conversation, and harmless mirth, intermingled at different periods with the refreshments of coffee and tea. About five, Johnson's face shone with meridian splendour, although his drink had been only lemonade; but the far greater part of us had deserted the colours of Bacchus, and were with difficulty rallied to partake of a second refreshment of coffee, which was scarcely ended when the day began to dawn.^[4]

Almost everything in this description—the analogy to a childbirth vigil, the inclusion in the company of not only the lady novelist's husband but also another lady ("now living"—as if available to testify to the wholesomeness of the proceedings), the homely and noninebriating refreshments (hot apple pie, lemonade, tea, and coffee), the good-natured rationality of the pastimes—attest to Mrs. Lennox's utter respectability and to the perfectly honorable sentiments of the company of men gathered around to pay her tribute.

Indeed, the ceremony seems to have been designed to conjure up and exorcise the unsavory associations that had attached themselves to female authorship. The "place appointed was the Devil tavern," and Johnson insisted that the festivities continue until dawn, as if to assert that his club, despite all received notions, could spend a "whole night" in a tavern in mixed company without compromising the women. Literary London, the gesture implies, even in its hideaways, was a fit place to entertain women as authors and ladies. Mrs. Lennox, receiving the bays twice from the hand of Johnson—one sprig, housewifely stuck in an apple pie, the other placed on her brows—is a fit symbol for the respectable domestication of female authorship that both complemented and guaranteed Johnson's high "notion of the dignity of literature."^[5]

Sir John Hawkins's account, though, even as it draws our attention to the inversions accomplished by the ceremony, closes on an odd note: "I well remember, at the instant of my going out of the

[4] Quoted in Small, pp. 10–11. For a thorough assessment of the reliability of this narrative, see James L. Clifford, "Johnson's First Club," in Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn , ed. René Wellek and Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 197–213.

[5] Boswell, Life of Johnson , vol. 3, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and revised by L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), p. 310.

tavern-door, the sensation of shame that affected me, occasioned not by reflection on any thing evil that had passed in the course of the night's entertainment, but on the resemblance it bore to a debauch."^[6] Exorcisms, after all, must recall the demons they attempt to expel; "the resemblance . . . to a debauch," integral to the enterprise of purging, itself produced an involuntary "sensation of shame." Extruded as she was, the apparition of the author-whore continued to haunt the site.

Moreover, she would not be eradicated if those present merely stressed the new authors' chastity and the moral seriousness of their works, for women writers had more than a legacy of sexual laxity to live down. They also had to provide a counter-image to the mercenary, selfish, disorderly, and politically opportunistic scandalmongers of the previous generation. This chapter will focus initially on the political and economic transformation of the authoress in the mid-eighteenth century. The story of her sexual reformation has already been well told elsewhere as a chapter in the history of the idea of "woman." Most accounts of the rise of the female novelist have understandably stressed the abrupt transformation in English manners and sexual mores that made mid-eighteenth-century writers disown such forebears as Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley.^[7] They have shown that women's authorship was both stimulated and regulated by sudden developments in the history of sexual difference: an unprecedented acceleration in the gendering and separation of public and private spheres; the notion that modesty, chastity, and unselfishness come "naturally" to women; and the claim that women qua women might therefore be entitled to some cultural authority.^[8] I wish to supplement and complicate this story by examining the authoress's reformation at

[6] Quoted in Small, p. 11.

[7] The fullest account of this change can be found in part 1 of Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Other recent accounts include Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago, 1989), esp. pp. 101–45; and Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 31–59. These books fill in the transitional history between Manley and Lennox, which is left out of my own account, by detailing the contributions of such early standard-bearers of respectability as Elizabeth Rowe and Penelope Aubin.

[8] On the general change in the "nature" of womanhood, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 149–92.

the discursive intersection of several other key terms which, like "woman," were undergoing revision in the mid-eighteenth century: "authorship," "sympathy," and "fiction." In exploring each of these terms, I will focus on a set of connections between property and propriety that will in turn explain why female authorship , as opposed to other kinds of activity, and why fiction writing, as opposed to other kinds of authorship, gained cultural prestige in this period. To put it more succinctly, I hope to explain why the rise of the respectable female writer was concurrent with the rise of the novel.

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Charlotte Lennox's career was shaped by a double "separation of spheres": (1) the formation of a specifically female-centered domestic enclave in contradistinction to the masculine public realms of politics and business, and (2) the creation of a separate and especially "dignified" class of authors, who could be distinguished from venal flatterers and party hacks. These two developments were similar in that ladies and literary gentlemen alike became too good to be put to everyday political use. A new disinterestedness and high-mindedness was imputed to women as a sex and to "men of letters" as a profession. The ancient contention that women were too passionate and unreasonable for state business was increasingly and paradoxically supplemented with the assertion that they were too virtuous to engage in political maneuvering and self-promotion. Similarly, the author underwent a transformation from the rather dangerous and unstable political operator of Queen Anne's reign to either a dispassionate Olympian observer or a disdainful judge of a political world that was morally far beneath him. In both developments, moreover, we should note the rising cultural stock of private experience. The private home was gradually being recognized and valued as the institution of moral formation, and the retired poet became an exemplum of authorial integrity.^[9]

To be sure, the virtues of women and authors were asserted in superficially contrasting terms. As Nancy Armstrong has demonstrated, the discourse concerning women's virtue in the eighteenth

[9] See Robert Folkenflik, "Patronage and the Poet-Hero," Huntington Library Quarterly 48 (1985): 363–79.

century to some extent suppressed the connection between women and property.^[10] The dignity of authorship, however, was frequently proclaimed on the basis of new relationships between authors and property. Since the first of these developments has been described by many books on women writers, I will turn to the rhetoric of authorship, preoccupied as it then was with the connection between property and propriety.

The separation of the sphere of men of letters from that of statesmen was in effect a separation of authors from their former patrons. This was often conceived as the severance of an old property relation and the establishment of a new one: authors were no longer to be the creatures of the great but were instead to be their own men. "All that men of power can do for men of genius is leave them at their liberty," wrote Thomas Gray at mid-century.^[11] Bertrand A. Goldgar has detailed the intricate political developments that brought about this stress on authorial self-possession. He has shown how writers gradually became alienated from the centers of power during Walpole's administration.^[12] George I's accession ended the vigorous party strife of Queen Anne's reign; the Tories were no longer viable, and many former Whig writers found themselves suffering from what they considered malign neglect under Walpole's government. An assemblage of resentful wits who had previously been political opponents thus looked back nostalgically to the days of party patronage under Halifax and Harley, idealizing those earlier politicians as disinterested supporters of literature for its own sake. Writers, they claimed, had been valued for their wit and capacity for independent thought, whereas Walpole hired the cheapest, dullest, and most servile hacks he could find. Walpole's treatment of writers, moreover, was said to be of a piece with the crudity and corruption of his entire administration.^[13] The cessation of party patronage for the major writers

[10] Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987). Armstrong develops this thesis primarily in the first two chapters of her study, pp. 28–95.

[11] Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. Gray (York, 1775), p. 238. See Robert Folkenflik's discussion of this passage in "Patronage and the Poet-Hero," pp. 368–69.

[12] Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1976).

[13] In fact, the Walpole ministry spent an unprecedented £20,000 per annum on political publications, not only supporting friendly writers but also sometimes buying the silence of opposition critics. See Paul J. Korshin, "Types of Eighteenth-Century Patronage," Eighteenth-Century Studies 7:4 (1974): 462.

of the period helped create a specifically literary opposition to the government: an opposition claiming to represent "letters" as a social counterforce to unscrupulous politics. Moreover, the rhetoric of this opposition, despite its frequent references to the golden age of patronage, emphasized the proud independence, the uncompromising self-ownership, of the true wits.

Thus the independent, patronless, author became the poet-hero of the age, an image that reached grandiose proportions in Pope's self-presentations.^[14] Witness, for example, this epitaph on himself:

Heroes, and kings! your distance keep:
In peace let one poor poet sleep,
Who never flatter'd folks like you:
Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.^[15]

The condemnation of Virgil here is complicated, for Pope is drawing on a Virgilian trope to make his point; he is both invoking classical precedents for heroizing retired independence and calling attention to the superior completeness of his self-ownership. At mid-century Johnson, in his celebrated letter to Lord Chesterfield (1755), made a similar allusion. Rebuking the aristocrat's insolent, patronizing appropriation of the Dictionary , Johnson wrote:

The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. Is not a patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot

[14] See Folkenflik for Pope's importance in establishing this poetic persona. Pope, however, benefited greatly from the early eighteenth century's most popular form of patronage—subscription publishing. See Matthew Hodgart, "The Subscription List for Pope's Iliad , 1715," in The Dress of Words , ed. R. B. White, Jr. (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1978), pp. 25–34; W. A. Speck, "Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription, 1700–1750," in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England , ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), pp. 47–48.

[15] Alexander Pope: Collected Poems , ed. Bonamy Dobree and introd. Clive T. Probyn (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), p. 124.

enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.^[16]

The patronless poet, though, as Johnson's rhetoric stresses, had become virtuous through privateness and privation, through being relegated to a private station, and through suffering a lack of property. At once denied and liberated from the service of great men, he presents himself as "poor" but honorably free from debt: "I hope it is no very cynical asperity," Johnson continues, "not to confess obligation where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron, which providence has enabled me to do for myself." Johnson, the pattern modern author, acknowledged a debt only to God; otherwise, he claimed to be his own man.

Owning himself, however, was no easy matter. The middle decades of the eighteenth century were not a period of expansion for the book trades,^[17] so when Johnson arrived in London in the later 1730s, he took almost any literary work he could get, writing prefatory essays, biographies, travel accounts, occasional poetry, and reports of parliamentary debates.^[18] With none of Pope's disdain for the hack, Johnson almost immediately began harping on his own hardships and describing "the laborious drudgeries which [authors] are forced to undergo in the recess of Parliament, or in a time of inaction, to give expression to wornout thoughts, to say something when they have nothing to say, and to find, in the most barren months, some field of praise or satire as yet untouched."^[19] On the basis of this same dreary workfulness, he claims in the same 1739 essay, "The character of an author must be allowed to

[16] The letter is reprinted in numerous places, among them John Wain, Samuel Johnson (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 176.

[17] See Jim Mitchell, "The Spread and Fluctuation of Eighteenth-Century Printing," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 230 (1985): 305–21. For a discussion of the possible effects of this stagnation on Johnson's attitude toward Grub Street as opposed to Pope's, see Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 60–62.

[18] See Edward A. Bloom, Samuel Johnson in Grub Street (Providence, RI: Brown Univ. Press, 1957), for a full account of Johnson's career as a journalist. One should especially note that Johnson was willing to take on political work; the distinction between letters and politics in the 1730s and 1740s was not as firm as Johnson later made it seem.

[19] Quoted in Bloom, p. 12.

imply in itself something amiable and great."^[20] In his self-characterizations and his numerous literary biographies, Johnson created the writer's life as one long heroic struggle against almost impossible economic odds.

Charlotte Lennox's own career fits this pattern of praiseworthy distress quite well. She was born abroad sometime during the decade preceding 1730; the daughter of an army officer, she spent part of her childhood in colonial New York. The date of her father's death and her arrival in England are said to be the same, but neither is exactly placed. In 1747 she published a volume of poetry, dedicated to her acknowledged patron, Lady Isabella Finch. Like Johnson's, however, her patron disappointed her; and like Johnson, Lennox later took a public revenge, attacking the lady as a false friend of the arts in a scandalous episode of The Life of Harriot Stuart . She briefly tried acting before writing her first two novels, and the enormous success of the second, The Female Quixote , led to a stream of commissions from her bookseller, Andrew Millar, that continued for over a decade. Between 1749 and 1764, according to her biographer, "almost every year . . . marks the publication of some work by her. Four of these were translations, two were partly translation but contained some independent writing; the rest were her own compositions."^[21] Like Johnson, she was a versatile general author who produced poetry, essays, a short-lived periodical, literary criticism, translations, and novels on demand. What she could not seem to do, despite her talent, popularity, and hard work, was make a comfortable living; her struggle to support herself certainly won her the admiring help of Johnson and several other men of letters, but her correspondence records her constant economic insecurity.

She called her steady employment "slavery to the booksellers" when soliciting the help of a prospective patron in 1760,^[22] and her complaint is typical of "independent" authors in the mid-eighteenth century.^[23] It was a time of extreme caution among booksell-

[20] Quoted in Bloom, p. 12.

[21] Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox , p. 31.

[22] The letter, to the duchess of Newcastle, is quoted in Small, p. 28.

[23] James Ralph, for example, compared the author, who, like Lennox, wrote for the booksellers, to "the Slave in the Mines": "Both have their tasks assigned them alike: both must drudge and starve; and neither can hope for Deliverance" (The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade Stated [London: R. Griffiths, 1758], p. 22).

ers, who operated on very narrow profit margins and were unwilling to gamble large amounts in "copy money" for new and untried compositions.^[24] In the 1750s, booksellers seem even to have preferred publishing "old" to new novels, a somewhat paradoxical turn of events given that a novel's appeal, as the name of the incipient genre implies, was supposed to be based on its novelty. John Feather gives us the traditional wisdom: "From the trade's point of view, the significance of the novel lay not in its literary merit but in its essential triviality. It was seen as an ephemeral production to be read once and then forgotten. This meant that, once the demand had been created, a continuous supply of new novels was needed to fill it."^[25] But either the trade had not yet caught on to the advantages of such planned obsolescence or the assumed demand had not yet been created by the 1750s, for the number of books published between 1740 and 1752 that literary historians now classify as "novels" fell significantly, and the number of new novel titles dropped steeply. Novels constituted approximately 4 percent of all titles printed between 1740 and 1760, a steadiness due, again, to the reprinting of old titles rather than to a constant turnover.^[26] It was not, therefore, a propitious time to begin a novel-writing career, and, indeed, few women took on the challenge. According to statistics compiled by Judith Phillips Stanton, only six women novelists began their publishing careers in the 1750s, as opposed to ten in the 1740s and seventeen in the 1760s.^[27]

[24] As Terry Belanger points out, "Standard theology, standard history, standard editions of the classics, standard works of practical instruction and standard English authors tended to have long and relatively secure sales; and to a considerable extent, the aspiring eighteenth-century author attempting to get a book published (except at his own expense) was competing with the collective backlist of the whole London trade" ("Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century England," in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England , ed. Isabel Rivers [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982], p. 16).

[25] A History of British Publishing (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 97.

[26] James Raven, introduction to British Fiction, 1750–1770: A Chronological Check-List of Prose Fiction Printed in Britain and Ireland (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1987), pp. 9–10. Counting only novels that identified themselves as such, Michael Crump comes up with much smaller numbers, but no evidence of an increase in the percentage of all books published between 1740 and 1760. See "Stranger than Fiction: The Eighteenth-Century True Story," in Searching the Eighteenth Century: Papers Presented at the Symposium on the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue in 1982 , ed. M. Crump and M. Harris (London: British Library, 1983), pp. 61–62.

[27] "Statistical Profile of Women Writing in English from 1660 to 1800," in Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts , ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), p. 251. I have been unable to find comparable statistics for male novelists in the period, but James Raven demonstrates that 14 percent of the new works of imaginative literature published between 1750 and 1769 are known to be by women, and women seem to have made up a fairly steady 17 percent of novelists in the period (Raven, p. 18). This is a smaller percentage than other historians have claimed, but Raven's numbers seem the most precise and reliable.

According to Cheryl Turner, between 1740 and 1760 the annual total of women's novels never exceeded four.^[28]

It is not surprising, then, that Millar was reluctant to publish The Female Quixote in 1752.^[29] After its huge success he commissioned other works by "the Author of The Female Quixote ," as Lennox signed herself, but since he already owned the copyright to her best-selling work (there were three editions and four printings in eleven years), he probably saw no reason to pay her large sums for the rights to lesser books. We can only speculate about the actual amounts, but in general copyrights to fiction were sold at extremely low prices. One historian tells us that

by the 1780s the leading novel publisher, William Lane, was paying his authors £10–20 for outright purchase of the manuscript. But both then, and it is safe to assume, in the earlier decades, a payment of half-a-guinea per volume was the final offer to many an untried novelist . . . [C]ontractual agreements almost never considered the future success of a work.^[30]

Hence, although Lennox was among the twenty best-selling novelists between 1750 and 1770,^[31] constant economic distress was her lot, and she seems to have always been hatching schemes to end the drudgery of her "independence": subscription editions of her works, a theatrical benefit, a government annuity for herself, or a place for her husband. Most of these projects failed, and contemporary accounts of Lennox consistently present her as an undeservedly impoverished woman. Just two years after her greatest success Henry Fielding mentioned her in the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon as "the inimitable and shamefully-distressed author of the

[28] Living by the Pen , p. 35.

[29] See the correspondence between Lennox and Samuel Johnson prior to the novel's publication, reprinted in "The Lennox Collection," ed. Duncan Isles, Harvard Library Bulletin 18 (October 1970): 339–40, esp. item 4.

[30] Raven, pp. 23–24. See also Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen , pp. 113–14, for the range of prices of copyrights for women's novel manuscripts during the eighteenth century.

[31] Raven, p. 14.

Female Quixote,"^[32] and Johnson sounded the same note in 1775 when he wrote "Proposals for Printing by Subscription, dedicated to the Queen, a new and elegant Edition of the Original Works of Mrs. Charlotte Lennox": "She hopes . . . that she shall not be considered as too indulgent to vanity, or too studious of interest, if, from that labour which has hitherto been chiefly gainful to others, she endeavours to obtain at last some profit for herself and her children."^[33]

At the end of this chapter, I will look at the feminization of Lennox's "distress" in the rhetoric of her contemporaries, but here I wish to emphasize that the mixture of victimization and heroism in these quotations is common to the period's discourse about authors. Sometime between Pope's Dunciad (1729) and Johnson's life of Savage (1744), Grub Street had become pathetic, and its pathos was closely intertwined with its dignified "independence." No longer the haunt of libelers and rogues, it harbored a new breed of worthy starvelings.

Behind the descriptions of proudly poor, dispossessed, and thereby dignified authors stood a background of beliefs about authorial property rights. What, after all, would be so pathetic about Charlotte Lennox's labor being "chiefly gainful to others" if there was no presumption that she had some "natural" right to profit from her productions? The rhetoric of dispossession and dignity relied on the rather new idea that authors had some legally recognized vendable property that served as the basis of their livelihood. An incipient concept of intellectual property was provided by the 1710 Statute of Anne, often called the first copyright law in English history, which both implied that copyright might be a property and vested it originally in the author. The Licensing Act that had lapsed in 1695 had granted the "copy," or right to print a book, to the member of the Stationers' Company who registered its title. How the manuscript, which was also sometimes called the "copy," came into the possession of the bookseller or printer was a moot question.^[34] No law for the regulation of the press previous to

[32] Quoted in Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox , p. 14.

[33] Quoted in Small, p. 44.

[34] Some historians have claimed that prior to 1710 the author was assumed to be a common law owner of a literary work, but the case for such a view is weak. See Frank Arthur Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling (London: Cape, 1930), pp. 169– 71; and Joseph Loewenstein, "For a History of Literary Property: John Wolfe's Reformation," ELR 18 (1988): 389–412. For a refutation of this view, see Mark Rose "The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741)," Cultural Critique 21 (Spring 1992): 197–217. On copyright, see also Chapter 2, note 27.

1710 made any mention of an author's rights or property, and hence the Statute of Anne might be said to have initiated the idea that texts, as opposed to manuscripts, were exchangeable commodities belonging ultimately to their authors by virtue of being "the product of their learning and labour."^[35] Most historians agree that the drafters of the statute intended merely to guard against piracy and booksellers' monopolies; the presumption was that authors, having no means to produce their own books, would sell their copyright to booksellers, who would enjoy the sole right to copy and sell the book for a period of fourteen years, at which time the copyright would revert to the author to be sold again. But although the establishment of copyright as an author's right was originally intended merely to secure the property of booksellers, the interpretations of the law increasingly stressed the author's prerogative.^[36] Hence, even though the statute left a number of complicated issues—the nature of property in a copyright, its tenure, the conditions of its infringement, and the definition of the author—unsettled, it can nevertheless be said to have initiated the legal notion that authors have a transferable right to control the printing and dissemination of their works.^[37]

[35] This phrase is from an early draft of the law quoted by John Feather in "The Book Trade in Politics: The Making of the Copyright Act of 1710," Publishing History 8 (1980): 35.

[36] Lyman Ray Patterson, in Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1968), puts the matter concisely:

The statutory copyright provided in the Statute of Anne was a publisher's copyright; but the act was construed to have provided an author's copyright. . . . This development had little to do with the Statute of Anne itself; but because the act provided for copyright, and the statutory copyright it provided later came to be an author's copyright, the inevitable conclusion was that the statutory copyright was originally designed to be an author's copyright. (p. 144)

[37] In addition to the works already cited, information on the Statute of Anne comes from Benjamin Kaplan, An Unhurried View of Copyright (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 1–38; Ian Parsons, "Copyright and Society," in Essays in the History of Publishing in Celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the House of Longman, 1724–1974 , ed. Asa Briggs (London: Longman, 1974), pp. 31–60; Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), pp. 99–121; Harry Ransom, The First Copyright Statute: An Essay on an Act for the Encouragement of Learning, 1710 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1956); Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); and Trevor Ross, "Copyright and the Invention of Tradition," Eighteenth-Century Studies 26:1 (1992): 1-27. Not all contemporaries thought that property rights per se were involved in the copyright disputes of the mid-century; numerous pamphlets insist that copyright is a monopoly , as opposed to a property, right. This was, indeed, the main argument against holding it in perpetuity.

Both the idea that authors should be their own people and the idea that they are the original owners of their copyrights indicate that their new dignity, the insistence on their worth and the unfairness of their lot was intertwined at mid-century with their characterization as dispossessed proprietors. But exactly what was their proprietary right based on? In cases where authorship might be contested, what would define it? When one looks at the decisions handed down under the Statute of Anne in early copyright disputes, one is struck by the emphasis the courts placed on "invention" or "originality" as the definitive characteristic of authorship. To be sure, "the law follows a highly subjective theory of originality that often surprises, and sometimes shocks, those encountering it for the first time," as one modern commentator has remarked.^[38] For example, in 1720, the bookseller who owned the copyright of Dr. Thomas Burnet's Latin work Archaeologiae Philosophicae tried to stop the publication of an English translation, but the court of Chancery ruled that a translation "may be called a different book, and the translator may be said to be the author" because he had invented a new form for the ideas.^[39] To question whether the plaintiff's rights had been infringed, therefore, was to question whether a translator was an author and, in turn, to ask whether the translator had originated or invented something. In this case, it was decided that the translator was an author even though he had not originated the ideas, for he had conceived a new form, and "forma dat esse rei ." Invention was also found to be the crucial criterion of authorship in cases involving abridgment; books that were only superficially changed or "colourably shortened" were judged to be piracies, but "a fair abridgement . . . may with great propriety be called a new book, because not only the paper and print, but the invention , learning, and judgment of the author [abridger] is shown in them."^[40]

[38] William S. Strong, The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 3.

[39] This case and the two that follow are discussed by Kaplan, pp. 10–12.

[40] Kaplan, pp. 10–11.

Determining "wherein consists the identity of a book"^[41] became a task of discovering authorship, which in large part became the task of discovering "invention." As the century progressed, copyright disputes became occasions for articulating even more radical notions of originality than have ever been incorporated in the law itself. In 1769, for example, one justice suggested copyright should protect the ideas of the work, and hence that the requirement of invention might not be satisfied by mere reformation or rewording, although he simultaneously admitted that ideas, divorced from the particulars of their expression, "were 'quite wild' and incapable of indicia certa. "^[42] The question whether an author was commonly, if not legally, definable as someone whose thoughts are original had, however, been broached, and the affirmative response was to gain wider acceptance over the next two centuries.

It is not surprising, then, that a similar valorization of unprecedented, unique conceptualization appeared in numerous discussions of literature. Indeed, literary criticism at mid-century was often an inquiry into what could properly be attributed to various writers as their own inventions, as if the critics, like the courts, had been set the task of ferreting out infringements of literary property. Charlotte Lennox's Shakespeare Illustrated is an excellent example of this genre; it even addresses itself to its dedicatee, the Right Honorable John, earl of Orrery, as "that Judge whom Pliny himself would have wished for his Assessor to hear a literary Cause."^[43] Its preface (which was, ironically enough in a work so punctilious about attribution, probably written by Johnson) flatly states that poets must be rated according to their powers of "Invention":

[A]nd of all the Degrees of Invention, the highest seems to be that which is able to produce a Series of Events. It is easy when the thread of a Story is once drawn to diversify it with Variety of Colours. . . . To tell over again a Story that has been told already, and to tell it better than the first Author is no rare Qualification; but to strike out the first Hints of a new Fable . . . is the utmost Effort of the human Mind.^[44]

[41] This phrase, from the case of Millar v. Taylor , is quoted by Kaplan, p. 12.

[42] Kaplan, p. 14.

[43] Shakespeare Illustrated (London, 1753), p. vii.

[44] Shakespeare Illustrated , pp. iv–v.

Shakespeare, it turns out, seldom succeeded in this supreme authorial "Effort" of fictionalizing, of making up new stories. Of course, the application of this mid-eighteenth-century standard of inventiveness to Shakespeare was wildly anachronistic; for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, poetic "Invention" referred to a particularly vivid use of language that could make events and people distant in time and space seem present to the hearer. "Invention" referred to the almost hallucinatory power of poetic figures. For example, when the chorus longs for "a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention" at the beginning of Henry V , the speech in no way indicates a desire to make up a new story. Instead, "invention" would retrieve the heroic past in its intensity: "Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, / Assume the port of Mars" (The Life of Henry the Fifth , Prologue, 1–6). The lines are, to be sure, sophisticated almost to the point of obscurity about the issue of mimesis; they express a wish to watch Harry play himself playing Mars. All this representational play, though, is purported to originate, not in the playwright's invention, but in the historical actors and events themselves. By 1753, however, "invention" had become closely associated with "the Fiction of a Tale,"^[45] and hence Lennox devoted herself to the "originals" of Shakespeare's plays. She translated the "novels and romances" she considered his primary sources and then went on to demonstrate how seldom the bard had been "able to produce any Thing by [his] own Imagination."^[46]

The concept of literary property, then, can be said to have promoted that of "Invention," which in turn found its apotheosis in the idea of pure fabulation, or original fiction writing. For if the story itself and the vehicle of its language, if both "idea" and "expression," were invented, authorship became incontestable. To be sure, there was no general pressure to turn all authorship into fiction writing; historians, for example, were not expected to prove themselves authors by making up stories. But even among historians, a modern emphasis on originality of conception and the

[45] Shakespeare Illustrated , p. xi. This section of the preface concedes that Shakespeare's genius was for verisimilitude rather than invention, but such a distinction would not have been comprehensible in the Renaissance, when verisimilitude was the aim of invention.

[46] Shakespeare Illustrated , pp. v–vi.

discovery of "new" facts distinguish eighteenth-century authors. "[T]he Fiction of a Tale" was not the only mark of invention, but it did provide a particularly thorough and incontrovertible claim to that authorial activity which determined the singular identity of a work.

Copyright law and criticism, moreover, were not the only places where legal and literary concerns converged to favor fiction as an indisputable authorial property. The slow decline of the roman scandaleux , its gradual replacement by narratives without keys, also illustrates the separation of spheres and the new authorial will to property. When Delarivier Manley defended herself against libel by claiming that the stories of The New Atalantis were entirely her own invention, pure fiction innocent of reference and hence of political import, she was, even if only facetiously, making a claim to private property. If she had invented her stories instead of appropriating and circulating someone else's, she should be found innocent. A story that was nobody's could also be hers; one that reflected on somebody, however, made her authorship at once criminal and doubtful, at once libelous and unoriginal. Although prosecutions for seditious libel were not officially concerned with violations of privacy, attacks on scandalmongers like Manley often stressed that they had taken liberties with the characters and reputations of "persons of quality" and were therefore guilty of personal injury or theft.

Indeed, that invention, property, and authorial innocence were closely linked in the early eighteenth century indicates a complicated interaction between criminal and property law. Foucault's influential argument that the early modern imperative to identify authors actually derived from the needs of state censors could be maintained in the English case only if one were willing to follow an extremely circuitous path of causation.^[47] The drafters of unsuc-

[47] In his influential essay "What Is an Author?" Michel Foucault makes a strong link between censorship and the invention of the author, but he seems to be generalizing from the French case. Foucault's essay is in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism , ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 141–60. For responses to Foucault on the French situation, see Molly Nesbit, "What Was an Author?" Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 229–57; and Carla Hesse, "Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777–1793," Representations 30 (1990): 109–32. See Martha Woodmansee, "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author,'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17:4 (1984): 425–48; and Mark Rose, "The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship," Representations 23 (1988): 51–85.

cessful Parliamentary bills between 1695 and 1710 often linked copyright and criminal liability, and Defoe's Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704) argued that the libel law itself implied authorial rights: "For if an Author has not the right of a Book, after he has made it, and the benefit be not his own, and the Law will not protect him in that Benefit, 'twould be very hard the law should pretend to punish him for it."^[48] Defoe's position here is the opposite of Manley's, since it claims that criminal prosecution assumes an intimate proprietary connection between authors and their works even when the works are libelous.

The 1710 statute, however, actually initiated a significant break between the legal issues of censorship and author's rights; John Feather, indeed, argues that the 1710 legislation had wide appeal because it did not involve "the delicate and unpopular area of censorship."^[49] Since, as we saw in the preceding chapter, all parties and factions routinely violated the law, no one had an interest in strengthening it; that is, although everybody wanted some libels suppressed, nobody in 1710 was very keen to suppress libel itself. Defoe may have articulated a common way of reasoning from criminal liability to authorial propriety, but the legislative history presents us with a full stop between the author-as-libeler and the author-as-proprietor, between the issues and practices shaping Manley's career and those shaping Lennox's.

What Johnson called the "Age of Authorship" was thus not the straightforward outcome of a disciplinary procedure; rather it appears to have been the result of the state's unwillingness to censor, which left the Stationers' Company without an external regulatory means to enforce copyright and keep the trade profitable. Hence the book trade supported the Statute of Anne, which accidentally thrust authorship into the foreground of disputes over copyright, thereby privileging "invention" and hence downgrading scandal, the mere repetition of what Delarivier Manely had called "old tales."

[48] An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (London, 1704; rpt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1948), pp. 27–28.

[49] "The Book Trade in Politics: The Making of the Copyright Act of 1710," p. 37.

This complicated process, coinciding with the decrease in political patronage, further reduced the rewards of libel. The cultural imperative not to infringe on the property of others and a widening notion of what "property" might be—words, ideas, characters, sentiments, stories—helped suppress coded promises to reveal secret histories while it fostered new forms of authorial credibility. Manley's alibi of nonreferentiality thus presaged and blended with a slightly later celebration of fiction as a form of writing deriving wholly from the author's imagination and therefore belonging to him or her in a peculiarly strong sense. Invention and originality, the talents associated with fiction writing, increasingly came to signal both innocence and entitlement.

A concern for authorial property, for attaching stories firmly to individual authors and detaching them from "originals" outside the text, therefore, led to a de-emphasis on the historical truth of a story and a concomitant stress on its originality, its fictionality. For the first time in the history of English letters, the historical untruth of a story could become an asset if one presented it as an instance of "the utmost Effort of the human Mind." Thus did a new respectability, deriving from the prestige of authorial property, attach itself to fiction as a category, partially obscuring what had hitherto seemed obvious: that the best stories were true ones.

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Thus far I have argued, first, that the heroizing of writers in the mid-eighteenth century was closely intertwined with contemporary attempts to identify the property of authorship and, second, that a new valuation of fiction emerged from this discursive nexus. Useful as this analysis may be in explaining why Johnson and Lennox made the claims they did for fiction, it does not, however, help us understand why their claims were so readily honored. We need to ask what purposes, besides the validation of authorship itself, the advancement of fiction served. After all, it would be farfetched to suggest that readers began to prefer fiction to scandal simply because they wanted to savor the originality of a bona fide author. This section of the chapter, therefore, addresses itself to the reader's, rather than the author's, sense of propriety and its affiliations

with the eighteenth-century ethical discourse about sympathy. I do not leave behind the issue of property but merely shift its location.

My discussion of the promotion of fiction through copyright disputes has tended to take the category of fiction for granted, to assume that there was always a branch of letters distinguished by its overt renunciation of particular referential truth claims. Recent historians of the novel, however, have shown that the concept of fiction, far from being a universal cultural category, developed slowly in early modern Europe, that the immediate predecessors of the novel—romances, secret histories, and memoirs—often claimed historical veracity, and that until the mid-eighteenth century, there was no widely employed means of distinguishing between a fiction and a lie. Indeed, the problem of differentiating kinds of untruth has generally plagued historians of the novel. In his introduction to A Check List of English Prose Fiction, 1700–1739 , William Harlin McBurney admits that he included works claiming to be true as long as he judged them to be "full of improbable lies."^[50] But fiction writing cannot be said to exist as a marked and recognized category in a culture until it can be effortlessly distinguished from lying. As Michael McKeon has exhaustively demonstrated, the terms for such a distinction were available in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, but they were seldom used.^[51] The discourse of fiction, therefore, was awaiting not so much the requisite conceptual tools as some cultural imperative to use them.

Once we recognize that it is rare to find cultures where the category of fiction is strongly marked and valued as such, and that in British history the category does not precede but is rather coterminous with the rise of the novel, the history of that genre raises new questions. Because histories of the novel long assumed that its genealogy lay in fictional forms, they tended to focus on the issue of realism. Where, they asked, did the taste for realistic novelistic fiction come from?—as if a taste for fiction already existed. But once we see that the novel derives from forms that were not at the time understood to be fictional, we must address a prior

[50] A Check List of English Prose Fiction, 1700–1739 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. ix.

[51] McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 25–64.

question. We should ask, not why the novel became the preferred form of fiction, but why fiction became a preferred form of narrative.

Both Lennard Davis and Michael McKeon have recently helped rephrase the question in these terms, and each has contributed important answers. Davis, denying that the novel developed primarily out of the romance and asserting that its origins lay in what he calls the "news-novel matrix"—the tangled mass of journalism, scandal, and political and religious controversy we examined in Chapter 3—points to the legal and political pressures that eventually legitimized fiction.^[52] McKeon, on the other hand, adheres to the romance-novel connection and identifies a dialectical development in romance that created an imperative for verisimilitude, which is imagined to be at once fictional and "truthful," in accordance with a newly expanded idea of truth. The movement from romance to novel, according to McKeon, rests on an underlying epistemological shift from truth-as-historical-accuracy to truth-as-mimetic-simulation. It was the widespread acceptance of verisimilitude as a form of truth, rather than a form of illusion or lying, that made fiction a category and simultaneously founded the novel as a genre. Verisimilitude is the leading term in McKeon's account; there is no realized prior category of fiction to which mimetic realism is added to produce the novel. Rather, the legitimation of the verisimilar (as opposed to the historical) allowed the separation of the fictional from the historical components of the romance and the development of the former as The Novel.^[53]

My own argument is deeply indebted to those of Davis and McKeon, but it focuses on some crucial, indeed definitive, aspects

[52] Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 25–70.

[53] McKeon, esp. pp. 39–64. Recent works on the origins of the novel that inform this discussion are, in addition to the books by Lennard Davis and Michael McKeon, Robert W. Uphaus, ed., The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990); Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction; John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987); Frances Ferguson, "Rape and the Rise of the Novel," Representations 20 (1987): 88–112; Homer Obed Brown, "Of the Title to Things Real: Conflicting Stories," ELH 55 (1988): 917–54; Lennard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987); Ralph W. Rader, "The Emergence of the Novel in England: Genre in History vs. History of Genre," Narrative 1:1 (1993): 69–83; and Robert Folkenflik, "The Heirs of Ian Watt," Eighteenth-Century Studies 25:2 (1991–92): 203–17.

of the novel that they largely ignore. Fiction no doubt renounces "historical" truth claims and replaces them with mimetic ones; this axiom would hold whether the nonfictional predecessor of the novel is news, scandal, or romance. However, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the tension between factuality and verisimilitude, between history and mimesis, could have been resolved in various ways or could simply have been left unresolved as the incommensurable layers of "allegorical" representation. Fiction writers, though, did more than admit their narratives lacked historical accuracy; after all, the authors of personal satire and scandalous "allegories" had gone that far and had, on occasion, achieved a high level of verisimilitude. But they were not, properly speaking, novelists, because their stories, whether pretending to exact historical accuracy or not, claimed to be about somebody, whereas the writers of admitted fictions professed to be telling nobody's story, that is, to be telling the stories of people who never actually lived. The most radical and least explored distinction between prenovelistic and novelistic narratives is that the former often claim particular extra-textual reference for their proper names and the latter normally do not.^[54] A few seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century narratives were forthrightly fictional, just as some late eighteenth-century stories insisted on their referentiality, and still others asked the reader to switch back and forth between referential and nonreferential assumptions. There was no sudden novelistic revolution that purged English narrative of somebody and replaced him or her with nobody. Nevertheless, in the middle decades of the century, fictional nobodies became the more popular and respectable protagonists.

In those decades, though, it was by no means taken for granted that everyone would want to read stories about nobody. Arabella,

[54] For a lucid philosophical discussion of the reference of proper names in fiction, see Richard Rorty, "Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?" in Funktionen des Fiktiven (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1983), pp. 67–93. Rorty concludes that a Parmenidean insistence on reference creates a problem about fiction, but that the problem would be avoided if one were consistently to view "language as behavior governed by conventions, like games, and to see 'reference' in terms of conventions which must be obeyed if one is to make a successful move in the game" (p. 71). Rorty also points out, however, that although different uses of "reference" are merely conventional, the move of claiming "no referent" constitutes the language game called "literature" in the modern period (pp. 92–93).

the heroine of Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote , articulates this reluctance and expresses common eighteenth-century objections to the new kind of narrative:

[H]e that writes without Intention to be credited, must write to little Purpose; for what Pleasure or Advantage can arise from Facts that never happened? What Examples can be afforded by the Patience of those who never suffered, or the Chastity of those who were never solicited? . . . When we hear a Story in common Life that raises our Wonder or Compassion, the first Confutation stills our Emotions, and however we were touched before, we then chase it from the Memory with Contempt as a Trifle, or with Indignation as an Imposture.^[55]

Arabella's two main challenges—that self-proclaimed fictions can neither instruct nor move the hearer—are met by her interlocutor in the novel with classic mid-century assertions of the peculiar truth and pleasure of the verisimilar. But there is a mismatch between the objections and their refutation, for Arabella has asked why one should care about people who never existed, not why one should take aesthetic pleasure in a well-accomplished mimesis. To respond that the accuracy of the mimesis is the foundation of the emotional response, and the emotional response is therefore a register of artistry, is to miss the force of Arabella's question: Why introduce disbelief simply to suspend it, however artfully, in the interest of creating what Arabella calls "Compassion"?

For "Compassion," after all, was generally acknowledged to be the end of fiction. As we have often been told, fiction in the eighteenth century was believed to be an important tool for inculcating moral sentiments.^[56] It was thought to allow the exercise of

[55] Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote , ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 376–77. Subsequent quotations from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

[56] The secondary literature on this topic is extensive. For recent studies see John Mullen, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986); Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987); David Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), and The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988). Although these books include many discussions of the links between eighteenth-century novels and moral sense philosophy, they tend not to ask why fiction , as opposed to another form of narrative, should have seemed to have a peculiar affinity with sympathetic sensibilities.

sympathy, that process by which one feels the joys and sufferings of another and may thereby be motivated to perform benevolent actions. Sympathy and the imagination, then, were linked in some ethical systems, and certain historians of the novel argue that the new cultural prestige of fiction depended on this link. Fiction, the argument assumes, makes it easy to appropriate another's point of view, to sympathize. But why?

Arabella's objection calls this assumption into question by pointing out that we might expect to find our emotions "stilled" if we understand that their objects do not have, and never have had, any actual existence like our own. And Arabella was by no means unique in her opinion; it is common to find early and mid-eighteenth-century commentators taking it for granted that a real hero would be easier to feel compassion for than a fictional one: "To pity a feign'd Hero," as one "novelist" expressed it, "is commendable, because it is a sure Argument that Compassion would not be wanting to a real one."^[57] The link between fiction and sympathy was often made during the period in these negative terms: only someone with sympathy to spare would be able to spend any on "a feign'd Hero." Fiction was thus not always conceived as a natural stimulus to sympathy; often it was seen as a test of how far one could extend compassion. Could it be extended to a paradoxical sympathy with nobody? If so, might not the very ambiguity of the phrase "sympathizing with nobody" warn us away from such an exercise? As Arabella and a good many other eighteenth-century skeptics were fond of remarking, there is something absurd about making up people to sympathize with. Why not just sympathize with the people who were already there?

I think that there is an answer to this question, that, pace Arabella's objections, Nobody was a more likely candidate for sympathy in this period than almost anybody else. To answer Arabella, I would like to turn briefly to David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature , where we will find the link between fiction and sympathy that usually goes without saying. I have chosen A Treatise not because it was an influential work in the eighteenth century (it

[57] The Unfortunate Duchess; or, the Lucky Gamester. A novel, founded on a true story (London, 1739), quoted in Michael Crump, "Stranger than Fiction: The Eighteenth-Century True Story," p. 67.

was not) but because literary critics are fond of quoting it to prove that eighteenth-century people believed that they naturally took on the emotional coloring of their human environment through the automatic operations of sympathy: "So close and intimate is the correspondence of human souls," wrote Hume, "that no sooner any person approaches me, than he diffuses on me all his opinions, and draws along my judgment in a greater or lesser degree."^[58] Such passages have made it easy for commentators to cite Hume as an "optimistic" moral philosopher who claimed there were no obstacles to fellow feeling.^[59] I will instead follow the lead of those writers who have stressed the problematic nature of Humean sympathy,^[60] noting that the philosopher's discussions of the concept are intricately interlaced with his discussions of property. Property, indeed, is an important brake on the dynamic of sympathy, and it can also be identified as the invisible link between sympathy and fiction. Hume's Treatise reveals why fictional characters were uniquely suitable objects of compassion. Because they were conjectural, suppositional identities belonging to no one, they could be universally appropriated. A story about nobody was nobody's story and hence could be entered, occupied, identified with by anybody.

Significantly, Hume's most extensive discussion of sympathy is inserted into the section of the Treatise dealing with pride and humility, the passions that he claims take the self as their object. Sympathy occurs smoothly and seems automatic when its object is the joy or sorrow of a member of our own family or a business partner, someone who, in the common parlance of the time, would be said to "belong" to us; it is not a self-forgetting process. Interwoven as it is with the possibility of knowing another mind, it is nevertheless self-referring. As Hume tersely reasons: "In sympathy there is an evident conversion of an idea into an impression. This

[58] A Treatise of Human Nature , ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 592. Subsequent quotations from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text and notes.

[59] See, for example, Kaplan, Sacred Tears , esp. pp. 18–20 and 25–27.

[60] For example, Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Christensen's description of Hume's alternate involvement in and detachment from the passions has helped me formulate the idea of emotional "practice." See also Carol Kay, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988).

conversion arises from the relation of objects to ourself. Ourself is always intimately present to us" (p. 320). That which is originally a distant, unemotional idea, in other words, becomes present by being folded in to that which is always present to us: our "impression" of ourselves. To sympathize is to expand this impression called the self to include impressions originally experienced as mere ideas of another's self.

Sympathy, then, is not an emotion about someone else but is rather the process by which someone else's emotion becomes our own. It is the conversion of the idea of someone else's passion into a lively impression of that passion, which is indistinguishable from actually feeling the passion oneself. Sympathy does not occur immediately, but is rather accomplished in three stages: (1) certain sense data (melancholy looks, open wounds, mournful language) communicate an idea of someone else's emotional state (unhappiness); (2) that idea becomes vital, forceful, and present through the operation of one or more relational principles linking sufferer and perceiver (cause and effect, contiguity and resemblance) and is thereby converted into an impression (impressions differ from ideas only in force and vivacity) of the other's emotion; (3) the impression (or vivacious perception) can, under certain conditions, be "so enlivened as to become the very sentiment or passion" (p. 319).

Such is the process by which sense (seeing the tears of another) leads to sentiment (feeling sad oneself); and according to Hume human beings are generally vulnerable to this form of emotional contagion. But the Treatise also strenuously insists that the process is rarely completed. It is especially likely to remain incomplete when the original sufferer is most clearly perceived to be somebody unrelated to us. The conversion of idea into sentiment, on the other hand, is most likely to occur when all three relational principles operate in a way that obscures the "otherness" of the original sufferer. In the case of human beings, Hume says, the relational principle of resemblance always operates: other people are always to some extent like us. But this is normally an insufficient basis for sympathy. Contiguity, mere physical proximity, is a somewhat stronger relational principle, but strongest of all is cause and effect, under which Hume classifies family relations and property relations (p. 310). "All these relations, when united together," Hume explains, "convey the impression or consciousness of our own

person to the idea of the sentiments or passions of others, and makes us conceive them in the strongest and most lively manner" (p. 318).

In short, we are most likely to experience the emotions of other people when those other people already belong to us. Sympathy is normally that process by which the emotions of those who are related to us come to be experienced by us as our own. What happens to the otherness of the other people in this process, an otherness already blurred by the relationships described? Do we become more mindful of their separate realities? Not really, and this is the paradox of Humean sympathy: another's internal state becomes "intimately present" only by losing its distinct quality of belonging to somebody else. "I cannot feel an emotion," writes Hume, "without it becoming in some sense my own." That is, when the process occurs, the very relationships of ownership on which it depends seem at once stretched out of recognizable shape and reasserted. I feel your emotion because you are already in some sense mine, but once the feeling is mine, it is no longer distinguished by being yours.

As one of Hume's commentators has pointed out, his concept of sympathy does not, strictly speaking, imply any increase in regard for the person sympathized with. Páll S. Árdal, indeed, comes up with an extreme illustration of how the process Hume calls sympathy might rather be expected to produce selfishness: if you have a desire for a glass of whiskey, he reasons, and I sympathize with you in a Humean fashion, all that's been accomplished is that I want a glass of whiskey, too.^[61] The likely outcome of my sympathizing with your yearning for a glass of whiskey is thus that I will try to get one for myself, not that I will try to satisfy you. My idea of your desire may have been the original stimulus, but by the time that the idea has been enlivened into my sentiment, you have become irrelevant. This illustration may give us an odd and in some ways distorting angle on Hume's version of sympathy, but it also allows us to see how easily the process he describes under that name might be expected to aggrandize the self and its properties, even as it unsettles the concept of a bounded, stable ego.

[61] Páll S. Árdal, Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1966), p. 46.

We might argue, then, that Humean sympathy is complete when it dispenses with its original "object," the original sufferer. I sympathize with the sentiments of others by making them mine; and the conditions for such an appropriation must be there at the outset: the person who originally feels them must somehow "belong" to me. Otherwise my senses will not travel the pathway to sentiment. Hume baldly claims that at first the passions with which we eventually sympathize "appear . . . in our mind as mere ideas, and are conceived to belong to another person, as we conceive of any other matter of fact" (p. 319). In other words, as long as the emotions are "conceived to belong to another person," they are rather cold, lifeless ideas; sympathy occurs when they lose this quality of belonging exclusively to another. As long as we perceive just the evidence of someone else's sentiment, we do not feel anything; the ideas must be impressed by the imagination into that which is always intimately present to us—ourselves—in order to become sentiments.

If we grant that Humean sympathy works by appropriating emotions, by transforming them from the emotions of another (mere ideas) to our emotions (lively sentiments), we can see how property (or, more precisely, its lack) serves as the invisible link between sympathy and fiction. The body of the other person, although it conveys the original sense data and serves as the basis for all the modes of relationship that supposedly allow sympathetic identification, is also paradoxically imagined to be a barrier. It communicates but it also marks out the sentiments as belonging to somebody else and hence as being simply objective facts. Our conception of the sentiments as appropriate to that rather than this body must be overcome in the process of sympathy. This proprietary barrier of the other's body is what fiction freely dispenses with; by representing feelings that belong to no other body, fiction actually facilitates the process of sympathy. It bypasses the stage at which the sentiments perceived in other bodies are mere matters of fact and gives us the illusion of immediately appropriable sentiments, free sentiments belonging to nobody and therefore identifiable with ourselves.

In these suppositions, we can see why fictional characters would emerge as universally engaging subjectivities. Because they are unmarked by a proprietary relationship to anyone in the real world,

we do not regard them with the "objective" eyes with which Hume claims we view the property of others. Although they lack all actual relation to the reader, which Hume believed was the foundation of sympathy, they similarly lack the impediment of being related to anyone else. Hence, they become a species of utopian common property, potential objects of universal identification. Another way to put this might be to say that since the stories are nobody's, everybody can have an equal interest in them. The questions that clustered around putatively "true" stories in the eighteenth century—is the story libelous? who should be allowed to tell it? whose interest does it serve to tell it this way?—vanish, and a new interest takes their place, a gratuitous and hence sympathetic, sentimental interest.

Fiction, then, stimulates sympathy because, with very few exceptions, it is easier to identify with nobody's story and share nobody's sentiments than to identify with anybody else's story and share anybody else's sentiments. But, paradoxically, we can always claim to be expanding our capacity for sympathy by reading fiction because, after all, if we can sympathize with nobody, then we can sympathize with anybody. Or so it would seem, but such sympathy remains on that level of abstraction where anybody is "nobody in particular" (the very definition of a novel character). Nobody was eligible to be the universally preferred anybody because nobody, unlike somebody, was never anybody else .

Hume notes that the quality of one's sympathy for a fictional character differs from that feeling elicited by people we believe to be real. The strength and duration of an impression, he argues, are partly determined by the perceiver's belief in the reality of the object; hence our sympathy with fictional entities should be relatively unstable, for all its intensity. He distinguishes between the "fervors" and "apparent agitations of the mind" that "poetic description" creates and the "firm and solid" impression left by historical narration (p. 631): "We observe . . . that such fictions are connected with nothing that is real. This observation makes us only lend ourselves, so to speak, to the fictions" (pp. 631–32).^[62]

[62] For other discussions of Hume and eighteenth-century fiction, see Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary , pp. 35–40; and John Passmore, Hume's Intentions (London: Duckworth, 1980), pp. 99–104.

This remark that fictional characters merely borrow our sympathy without fully claiming it gives us another hint about their peculiar efficacy, their ability to "excite" the mind without producing "that weight" (p. 631) of real entities. The lighter, temporary quality of fictional identification further separates it from the weightier but also therefore more difficult task of sympathizing with others.

Conversely, however, Hume also entertains the idea that merely imaginary objects can arouse peculiarly strong emotional responses. Admitting that the essential mechanism of sympathy, the conversion of a mere idea into an impression and then into an actual bodily sensation, might not rely on the existence of anything outside the individual's imagination, he lists several instances in which, because nobody actually feels the emotions with which one sympathizes (p. 386), the imagination is stimulated to produce sentiments "that arise by a transition from affections, which have no existence" (p. 370).^[63] Since sympathy works by making sensations out of ideas, the normal empiricist trajectory from body to mind may be reversed: "The lively idea of any object always approaches its impression; and 'tis certain we may feel sickness and pain from the mere force of imagination, and make a malady real by often thinking of it" (p. 319). That Hume's exposition of sympathy should thus find an illustration in one of the eighteenth century's favorite types of tyrannical selfishness, the hypochondriac, indicates that the deeper one looks into it, the more Humean sympathy renders unreal and irrelevant its ostensible object: somebody else.

A similarly strong sense both of the impediments to sympathizing with other actual people and of the attenuation of otherness as a result of sympathy lies at the heart of the novel's most important formal trait: its overt fictionality. The very specificity and particularity of realist representation, moreover, should be viewed as confirmation, rather than obfuscation, of fiction. Those techniques that make up what Ian Watt called the novel's "formal realism"—its wealth of circumstantial and physical detail, its delineation of characters by specific class, gender, and regional characteristics,

[63] Hume is referring here, not to the operations of fiction per se, but to those of the "general rules," which are "established persuasions founded on memory and custom" (p. 632). Although he claims that there is a difference between fictions and general rules, he also admits that he cannot define it (pp. 631–32).

and so forth—are all overtly illusionistic confessions that the particulars of the novel character have no extra-textual existence. The character came into fictional existence most fully only when he or she was developed as nobody in particular ; that is, the particularities had to be fully specified to ensure the felt fictionality of the character. A generalized character would too easily take on allegorical or symbolic reference, just as one rendered in mere "hints" would have been read at the time as a scandalous libel. Thinness of detail almost always indicated specific extra-textual reference. But the more characters were loaded with circumstantial and seemingly insignificant properties, the more the readers were assured that the text was at once assuming and making up for its reference to nobody at all. Roland Barthes has pointed out that the contingent, unmotivated detail was the code of the "real" in fiction, but he did not draw what seems to me an obvious conclusion: that realism was the code of the fictional. The very realism of the new form, therefore, enabled readers to appropriate the stories sympathetically, for readers of fiction could be, to paraphrase Burke, "acquisitive without impertinence."^[64]

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In at least two ways overt fictions, invented narratives about people who never were, became both more strongly marked and more positively valued in the mid-eighteenth century than they had been previously: first, the birth of the author-proprietor, whose property claims might rest on his or her "faculty of invention"; and, second, a new emphasis on "sympathy" in discussions of human nature that made nobody's story especially appealing. The fictionality of the novel thus simultaneously, if somewhat paradoxically, allowed both the author and the reader to be "acquisitive without impertinence." That the story was nobody's made it entirely the author's;

[64] Burke claims that the sympathetic interest inspired by art, combined with its representational distance from real people, allows viewers to be "inquisitive without impertinence" (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , ed. J. T. Boulton [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958], p. 53). Burke shares the period's understanding that a consciousness of the difference between representation and reality stimulates interest and emotional response.

that it was nobody's also left it open to the reader's sentimental appropriation.

The sources of this desire for sentimental appropriation cannot be adequately catalogued here. Volumes have been written on the mid-eighteenth-century affective revolution—a term that comprehends such phenomena as changes in family structure, the development of a discourse of "sensibility," the spread of emotionally involving religious revivals, the rise of "humane" reform movements, the articulation of moral sense philosophy, the invention of aesthetics, stricter demands for sexual propriety, and the discovery of specifically female virtues. The growth of commerce, the rise of the urban middle class, the new discursiveness and subjectivity of discipline, the burgeoning of the fiscal-military state, and the growth of the national debt have all been suggested as the underlying "causes," common threads, or discursive "knots" linking these developments.

It is seldom disputed, however, that there was a revolution in sensibility in mid-eighteenth-century England. This section of the chapter connects one part of it, the discourse on sympathy we have already examined, to both the rise of fiction and new forms of feminine subjectivity. Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote serves as my text for analyzing these connections,^[65] so I return to Arabella's resistance to fiction and ask why she must learn to sympathize with nobody in order to become a modern young woman, ready for matrimony.

First, I have to demonstrate that Arabella does resist fiction, a

[65] For critical discussion of Charlotte Lennox and The Female Quixote , see Catherine A. Craft, "Reworking Male Models: Aphra Behn's Fair Vow-Breaker , Eliza Haywood's Fantomina , and Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote," Modern Language Review 86 (1991): 821–38; Margaret Doody, "Shakespeare's Novels: Charlotte Lennox Illustrated," Studies in the Novel 19 (1987): 296–310; Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740–1820: A Feminized Genre (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1991), pp. 47–54; Laurie Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 62–92; James J. Lynch, "Romance and Realism in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote," Essays in Literature 14 (1987): 51–63; Deborah Ross, "Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote," Studies in English Literature 27 (1986): 455–73; Patricia Meyer Spacks, "The Subtle Sophistry of Desire: Dr. Johnson and The Female Quixote," Modern Philology 85 (1988): 532–42; Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist , pp. 187–92; Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen (London: Pandora, 1986), pp. 194–205; Todd, The Sign of Angellica , pp. 152–60; and Leland E. Warren, "Of the Conversation of Women: The Female Quixote and the Dream of Perfection," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 11 (1982): 367–80.

fact that has not generally been noticed; indeed, most commentators take her to be resisting reality. To be sure, Lennox, like Cervantes, implicitly announces that the "realism" of her own book is superior to that of the romances her heroine has read and is trying to relive. This denigration of romance and promotion of realism has seemed to many critics an attack on fiction in general. In the best of these analyses, Laurie Langbauer contends that Lennox equates romance and fiction and that Arabella "is the ideal [fiction] reader, completely given over to the sway of the text, attesting to the power of romance."^[66] Langbauer argues that Lennox's novel tries to dissociate itself from its own fictiveness by attributing it to romance, making romance Arabella's disease, and then curing her of it. She argues further that the novel fails in this project, that "romance" and "novel" ultimately become indistinguishable, and that their final similarity signals "the powerful, subversive forces not just of one genre, romance, but of all writing."^[67] Langbauer clinches her argument by pointing out that when Arabella learns romances are "senseless fictions," she gets married and the story ends. Patriarchal reality is thus all along what Arabella has resisted, and romance (read fiction) was her method of resistance.

Langbauer's argument (superficially plausible and useful as it is for launching a detailed description of The Female Quixote 's formal traits, stylistic impulses, and interweaving of the issues of gender and genre) nevertheless proceeds from questionable assumptions: that the novel as a genre tries to hide its fictionality; that its realism amounts to a naive claim on the real; that it wants its reader to be like Arabella, to imagine that the persons and incidents had, or have, specific extra-textual referents. Langbauer states the argument in even more general terms: novels typify "phallogocentric" writings of all kinds, which are forever attempting to hide the marks of their textuality. Since Langbauer begins with these ideas, the dependence of the novel on the romance (the explicitly fictional, the excessively textual) in The Female Quixote appears to her a hidden code revealing female subversion of the male order of representation.

But if one believes, on the contrary, that the novel is explicitly

[66] Langbauer, Women and Romance , p. 65.

[67] Women and Romance , p. 30.

the story of nobody in particular, one might argue that the romance-novel connection, far from subversively exploding the book's surface "reality," simply signals the kind of fiction being read. The reader who did not notice that the engine of the plot is Arabella's determination to translate the mundane events of her life into romance adventures would be unable to comprehend the book as, in Henry Fielding's phrase, "a regular story"^[68] or, in Johnson's terms, "a comic romance"; that is to say, she would be unable to recognize it as a satirical novel if she missed its structural dependence on the parodied form of romance. The difference between Arabella and the novel reader, the reader of The Female Quixote , is that Arabella does not know she is reading fiction and, as we have already seen, does not value fiction per se, whereas the reader of this book can register that she is reading a satire, can get the jokes, only by understanding that she is reading a fiction. The reader's superiority, therefore, lies in a superior grasp of reality that proceeds entirely from an awareness of fiction. This is the awareness Arabella herself resists but that the novel and the novel reader, far from repressing, acknowledge at the outset.

The satirical nature of this novel, therefore, ensures that no contrast between fiction and realism is possible; rather, the contrast, unstable as it is, holds between fantastic and realistic fiction.^[69] For The Female Quixote cannot define its fictional characteristics without promoting its realism. Most obviously, as its earliest commenders noted, it aims for a high level of what we now call "novelistic" probability.^[70] Fielding, for example, praised it for avoiding the incredibility that Cervantes's Don Quixote indulged:

[Don Quixote ] in many Instances, approaches very near to the Romances which he ridicules. Such are the Stories of Cardenio and

[68] The Covent Garden Journal , no. 24 (March 24, 1752); rpt. in The Covent Garden Journal by Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain, ed. Gerard Edward Jensen, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1915), p. 281.

[69] James J. Lynch makes this argument in "Romance and Realism in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote ." He claims that the novel enacts and celebrates the conversion of romance conventions into those of the sentimental, rather than the realistic, novel. For another look at the novel's use of "romance elements" and its departure from "realism," see Deborah Ross, "Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote ."

[70] For a full discussion of the paradoxical relationship between probability and fictionality, see Robert Newsom, A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988).

Dorothea, Ferdinand and Lucinda, &c. In the [Female Quixote ] their [sic ] is nothing except the Absurdities of the Heroine herself, which is carried beyond Common-Life; nor is there any thing even in her Character, which the Brain a little distempered may not account for.^[71]

For Fielding, the work's high level of probability makes it satirically self-consistent: that is, artful.

The "realism" of this book is not a suppression of fiction but rather a sign that fiction is to be taken for granted; The Female Quixote shares with other early novels the attempt to make fiction that which goes without saying. Hence the evidence that could be adduced for fiction's suppression in novels, the apparent lack of reflective self-consciousness, can also be construed as proof of fiction's givenness in the form.

The "good divine," the "doctor" who cures Arabella of her resistance during the episode discussed earlier in this chapter, points out that probability and illusionistic realism, in contrast to the romance's "self-evident" absurdity, mark "the Perfection of Fiction" (p. 378). The task of the early novel is to establish fiction as the ground of the reading experience without constantly calling attention to it. The novel places itself on a suppositional ontological plane, where "credit" is only solicited conditionally, on the revived Aristotelian terms not of "belief" but of "suspended dis belief." The contract between writer and reader implicit in the very conventions of realism specifies that the reader is to believe the story as fiction , to grant a conditional assent, to "lend" herself, as Hume put it, for the period of reading, or as long as the writer keeps the story plausible by "delighting the Imagination without shocking the Judgment."^[72] The doctor of The Female Quixote , as if glossing this phrase from Lennox's Shakespeare Illustrated , specifies the writer's stake in this contract, his or her "expense of invention":

[T]here can be no Difficulty in framing a Tale, if we are left at Liberty to invert all History and Nature for our own Conveniency. When a Crime is to be concealed, it is easy to cover it with an imaginary Wood. When Virtue is to be rewarded, a Nation with a new Name may, without any Expence of Invention, raise her to the Throne. When Ariosto was told of the Magnificence of his Palaces, he answered, that the Cost of poetical Architecture was very little; and

[71] Newsom, p. 281.

[72] Shakespeare Illustrated , p. v.

still less is the Cost of Building without Art, than without Materials. (p. 378)

The probability of an invention is thus the sign of the author's expense of art. There is, then, simply no way to tell the difference between fiction's self-effacement (art) and its fulfillment (art).

As the doctor's words emphasize, Arabella, in resisting fiction, refuses to recognize Authorship, the achievement of "costly," plausible inventions; hence, contrary to Langbauer's assertion, she is not the sort of reader a novelist would desire. To appreciate the new form, the reader had first of all to understand what it was. Arabella's spiritual doctor speaks here in the voice of the Author who must teach the naive reader to recognize and thus properly value the "utmost Effort of the human Mind": the invention of a believable fiction. Such speeches are appropriate to early novels, for the writers of the first genre to mark itself "fiction" had to teach their readers to presuppose and appreciate fictionality, to tell cheap from costly inventions. But this was not an easy task, for the more costly, or artful, the novel, the more the fictionality was supposed to permeate it as the realistic illusion that should have gone unremarked.

Hence the usefulness of the quixotic tale, in which romance served not only as the satirical object but also as the pretext for a metafictional discourse. Such tales allowed for the thematization of fiction without undermining that plausibility which the tale itself denominated the perfection of fiction. Although the romance does, as Langbauer points out, bear the thematic burden of untruth in The Female Quixote , its purpose is not to disencumber the novel of the "unreal" but to allow for the new form's self-presentation as the regulation and explicit fulfillment of what had previously been an unruly because unacknowledged practice. The Quixote's cure begins not with the renunciation but with the acknowledgment of fiction.

It follows from these observations, however, that in curing Arabella of her resistance to fiction, The Female Quixote suggests incompatible views of its own novelty: first, it reveals its participation in the invention of fiction as an explicit category of narrative, thereby acknowledging that fiction was only then in the process of coming into self-conscious being; and second, it pretends to explore the history of fiction, thereby implying that fiction had been around

for centuries, just waiting to be recognized. We might, then, agree with Langbauer that the novel deliberately regulates the category of "fiction," but we would have to add that it simultaneously purports to be inventing the category. The critical commonplace—that the novel endeavors to chastise and control fiction—is undeniable, but to conclude that this regulative ethos implies separation from, or ambivalence about, fiction is mistaken. We fall into this mistake frequently because we naively credit only one of The Female Quixote 's artful inventions: the story that there was a fictional form called romance, which existed prior to the novel's identification of it as its own errant ancestor. We ignore the novel's simultaneous, but subtler, claim to be originating the very concept of fiction. Arabella, we should remember, has to learn that there is such a thing—a species of writing that does not "claim to be credited" (p. 376)—so that she can understand why romance is an old, surpassed, imperfect version of it. Inventing fiction and identifying its history, learning to take it for granted and engaging in a metadiscourse about it are equally necessary to her new sanity.

Moreover, once we see that Arabella's sanity lies in her acceptance of fiction, we can get a full view of the novel's generic play, which provides additional evidence that romance is not simply its despised generic scapegoat. Bringing Arabella to sanity was certainly a process of sanitizing the genre of the novel by presenting it as fresh and regular, as well as candid and lucid about its ontological status. By incorporating romance as its explicitly transcended history, furthermore, the novel sanitizes itself in a less obvious way: it creates what we might call a generic "screen memory" of its own absurd early romantic distempers in order to conceal its truly scandalous history. The Female Quixote makes the novel's dependence on, and close historical alliance with, romance as obvious as possible, insisting on binding the two genres together with the thread of "fiction," in order to make a clean break between the novel and its more immediate "ancestor," the scandalous chronicle. Watching early "realistic novels" confess to, and thereby purge, the peccadilloes of the romance is so "diverting," to use one of Lennox's favorite words, that we forget a fundamental fact: in the early eighteenth century the scandal of the novel was not "nonsensical fiction" but scandal .

Eighteenth-century readers noticed that there was a gap in The

Female Quixote 's tacit history of its own form. Fielding, for example, who always avoided the word "novel" for his own stories and was every bit as solicitous as Lennox to find innocent, fictional, and satirizable ancestors, "cannot omit observing, that . . . the Humour of Romance, which is principally ridiculed in this work, [is] not at present greatly in fashion in this Kingdom."^[73] And in 1785, Clara Reeve remarked that The Female Quixote "came some thirty or forty years too late. . . . Romances at this time were quite out of fashion, and the press groaned under the weight of Novels, which sprung up like Mushrooms every year."^[74] In their discussions of Lennox, neither Fielding nor Reeve specifies just what characterized the "novel" fungus. Elsewhere, however, Fielding does refer explicitly to "the modern novel and Atalantis writers" in the very act of claiming that he has never read them,^[75] and Clara Reeve names "Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manly and Mrs. Heywood" as the writers who dominated popular narrative after the heroic romance and before the realistic novel. As one modern critic has pointed out, the chroniques scandaleuses of these writers used "the lofty diction of romance . . . only to heighten the salacious appeal" of "slander and vice," so that "the rhetoric of romance, still genuinely idealistic in La Calprenède, Mlle. de Scudéry, and others, came to be associated with scenes of illicit sexuality."^[76] Scandal, therefore, would itself have been understood by contemporary readers as a parody of romance. In writing an explicitly fictional romance parody, Lennox was not only foreshortening the history of the novel to emphasize its innocence but also placing her book in a competitive, antagonistic relationship to the libelous parodies. Hence, although we are diverted from noting that scandal is an eligible forebear of the book we are reading, we are encouraged to note that it dominates the discourse of the novel's despised "fashionable world."

Scandal, therefore, is certainly not absent from The Female Quixote ; indeed, it is the mode of storytelling that the novel most often contrasts to romance. The contrast, moreover, generally consists in

[73] Covent Garden Journal , p. 282.

[74] The Progress of Romance (London, 1785; rpt. New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), vol. 2, p. 7.

[75] Joseph Andrews , ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1967), book 3, chapter 1, p. 187.

[76] Dieter Schultz, "'Novel,' 'Romance,' and Popular Fiction in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century," Studies in Philology 70 (January 1973): 80 and 90.

ironic inversions that trace the fall of "the lofty diction of romance" from "genuine idealism" into the low service of "vice and slander." One of the book's oft-repeated jokes is its play on the word "adventure," by which Arabella means the high-heroic actions of ladies in defense of their honor and all the other characters mean illicit sexual affairs. Hence, when Arabella asks the women she encounters to relate "adventures," they imagine she is soliciting scandal or accusing them of behaving improperly. Trying to begin an intimacy with her fashionable cousin, Charlotte Glanville, for example, Arabella asks,

Whence comes it, Cousin, . . . being so young and lovely as you are, that you, questionless, have been engaged in many Adventures, you have never reposed Trust enough in me to favour me with a Recital of them?

Engaged in many Adventures, madam! returned Miss Glanville , not liking the Phrase: I believe I have been engaged in as few as your Ladyship.

You are too obliging, returned Arabella , who mistook what she said for a Compliment; for since you have more Beauty than I, and have also had more Opportunities of making youself beloved, questionless you have a greater Number of Admirers.

As for Admirers, said Miss Charlotte , bridling, I fancy I have had my Share! . . . [B]ut, I assure you, Madam, I have had no Adventures, as you call them, with any of them.

No, really? interrupted Arabella , innocently.

Arabella "innocently" goes on to explain that many heroines have been "run away with," citing Scudéry's Mandane (heroine of The Grand Cyrus ), whom Charlotte takes to be a notorious contemporary and "a Jew , by her outlandish Name." Charlotte, moreover, persists in hearing Arabella's chivalric jargon as the language of scandal when the subject of "favours" is raised; Arabella is speaking of the trinkets (scarves, and so forth) that a lady might give her champion, whereas Charlotte takes the word to mean sexual commerce: "You have made no Scruple to own, Madam, said [Miss Glanville], that you think me capable of granting Favours to Lovers, when, Heaven knows, I never granted a Kiss without a great deal of Confusion." Now it is Arabella's turn to be shocked: "I never injured you so much in my Thoughts, as to suppose you ever granted a Favour of so criminal a Nature." And Charlotte is all the more convinced that

her cousin has only been trying to verify some scandalous gossip she's heard: "All you have said in vindication of granting Favours, was only to draw me into a Confession of what I have done: How ungenerous was that! (pp. 87–89).

Such comic confusions rest on the knowledge that the euphemistic and ironic language of scandal had changed the meaning of key romantic terms, and that one could no longer hear the rhetoric of romance without construing it as a slanderous jest. Arabella alone, having never lived in the "world," is innocent of the newer genre. Almost all her quixotic mistakes about women proceed from her ignorance of scandal; having elicited a recital of Miss Groves's "adventures," for example, she swiftly reformulates the story according to romantic conventions, leaving the woman who supplied her with the material (who expected to be paid for her trouble) to reflect that her ladyship "seemed so little sensible of the Pleasure of Scandal, as to be wholly ignorant of its nature; and not to know it when it was told her" (p. 77).

The novel's regulation of romance itself necessitates the recognition and rejection of scandal; Arabella must learn to "know it when it [is] told her," and yet remain "so little sensible of [its] Pleasure." Only then will she quit asking to hear the stories of real people. Hence we are given an episode that becomes a discourse on scandal, which precedes and parallels the discourse on fiction. Wishing to engage in "innocent Amusement" at a Bath assembly, Arabella asks Mr. Tinsel to tell her "the Adventures of many Persons whom they were viewing." A notorious scandalmonger, Tinsel is happy to oblige and is only slightly put off when Arabella tries to gather a little audience in imitation of the scenes of interpolated storytelling in the heroic romances, where "Kings, Princes, and Commanders of Armies, thought it was no Waste of their Time . . . to listen many Hours to the Relation of one single History" (p. 274). Mr. Tinsel, momentarily overawed and confused by "the Solemnity with which she requested his Information," finally gives a series of vignettes in exactly the style of The New Atalantis , with its insistent deictics ("That Lady was for many Years the Mistress of a young military Nobleman . . . this same haughty Peer"; "Observe that gay, splendid lady"; "one of our great Sea Commanders . . . happen'd to lodge at this Inn"; "Such was the Origin of this fantastick Lady") and rhetorical questions stressing the

difference between appearance and reality ("Would one not imagine . . . this fine Lady was a Person of very exalted Rank?" [pp. 275–76.]).

In her disappointment at these short and unedifying portraits, Arabella blurts out the standard definition of scandal: "I know not what to make of the Histories he has been relating. I think they do not deserve that Name, and are rather detached Pieces of Satire on particular Persons, than a serious Relation of Facts" (p. 276). Finally Arabella knows scandal, and explicitly dismisses it for being generally inapplicable ("The Ugliness of Vice . . . ought only to be represented to the Vicious") and in itself blameworthy ("that very Inclination . . . to hear other Peoples Faults, may by those very People, be condemned as one, and afford them the same Kind of ill-natur'd Pleasure you are so desirous of"). With this pronouncement that to seek scandal is to be scandalous, that even to learn from it is to admit one's viciousness, the novel not only chastises but also repels the reader of the chronique scandaleuse . The guilty reader is not she who aspires to romance, only wanting to hear "something which may at once improve and delight me; something which may excite my Admiration, engage my Esteem, or influence my Practice,"^[77] but rather she who is amused with the emotionally and narratively "detached" relation of "other Peoples Faults." It is the scandalmonger, dealing in "other people's" stories and expecting "to be credited," who serves as the novelist's negative double, not the innocent romance writer, who was merely insufficiently attentive to the distinction between history and fiction.

It is, therefore, a rival genre with a claim on the "real"—scandal—that is disclaimed by the early novelist in the process of owning and regulating fiction. Now that these generic distinctions, connections, and contrasts have been sorted out and we can consequently see that Arabella must both suppress her "impertinent" curiosity about real people and accept the existence of fiction, we can return to my question how such lessons about literary genre make Arabella willing to wed.

[77] For a closer look at the competition between writers who followed the "idealistic" practice of the seventeenth-century romancers and those who debased the form into scandal in the 1730s, see William H. McBurney, "Edmund Curll, Mrs. Jane Barker, and the English Novel," Philological Quarterly 37 (October 1958): 385–99.

As several critics have noted, Arabella resists marriage because she is busy being true to her books. Her quixotism, like that of her prototype, consists in attempting to prove that the heroic romances are true by living them. Her attempt arises, however, not out of an unquestioning faith in the resemblance between the order of the world and the order of language,^[78] but out of the perception of a dissimilarity between the two that might be called internal to reading—a contradiction between what she reads and the fact that she is reading it. Arabella, we are told, reads romances because she is "wholly secluded from the World." Consulting her mirror, she sees the same dazzling beauty she has read about, but consulting her experience, she notes a potentially humiliating discrepancy: "[S]he could not comprehend, how any Solitude could be obscure enough to conceal a Beauty like hers from Notice; and thought the Reputation of her Charms sufficient to bring a Crowd of Adorers to demand her of her Father" (pp. 7–8). Her solitude, the very condition that immerses her in romance reading, is rendered incomprehensible by that activity; that Arabella has so much time to read unmolested in itself refutes either what the books say or her narcissistic belief that what they say is applicable to her life. Since having time and privacy enough to read the books necessarily calls either their truth or their pertinence into question, Arabella's story begins with the irreparable gap that reading itself has made between existence (solitary reading) and its representation (a crowd of suitors).

Although this gap is too fundamental to be ignored, Arabella attempts to overcome it, most obviously by imagining that she is in fact already besieged by lovers (gardeners, casual visitors to the neighborhood) in disguise who are too deferential or deceitful to declare themselves. Hence the gap between what she reads and the fact that she is reading is only apparent. However, when her cousin appears and openly asks her to marry him, her expedient for protecting the truth of the books collapses: if suitors behaved like her cousin, she would never have had any time for reading. He insists on interrupting her solitude and telling her he loves her: "What a horrid Violation this," reflects Arabella, "of all the Laws of

[78] See Foucault's discussion of Don Quixote in The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 46–50.

Gallantry and Respect, which decree a Lover to suffer whole Years in Silence" (p. 32). By breaking silence, young Glanville threatens to open the gap in the reading that Arabella had papered over by assuring herself her lovers were there but afraid to call attention to themselves. Thus, to protect the integrity of her reading and her own narcissistic investment in it, Arabella endeavors to live out her youth without ever actually hearing a marriage proposal.

She has, moreover, another, subtler, way of avoiding the paradox of reading; she places the romances in an eternal realm, denying the time and effort spent in reading them by expecting everyone she meets to know them perfectly. She behaves as if the books must be universally known, always already read, so that she can forget the fact that calls their "reality" into question: that she, a heroine, has unaccountably been allowed to spend most of her life reading them. Quite a bit of the book's humor turns on Arabella's ridiculous insistence that the romances can be taken for granted: she finds it "inconceivable" that the seamstress she asks to make her a dress in the style of the Princess Julia requires any further directions, and her conversation consists in lengthy glosses on the lives of heroines (always delivered as if the facts were common knowledge) that integrate her auditors' signs of puzzlement or impatience as alternative interpretations. She is generally mortified when she has to tell the stories or refer to the actual books, for such references to their textuality open the gap between the stories and their reading that threatens her role as heroine.

As readers, however, we are never allowed to forget the textuality of the romances. Every time Arabella opens her mouth, we are reminded that she read them "not in the original French , but very bad Translations" (p. 7); midway between French and English, her language takes on the ridiculous opacity of doubled textuality,^[79] which is then comically intensified when her maid tries, as instructed, to repeat her speeches word for word.^[80] The more Arabella

[79] Dorothy Osborne objected to these translations: "I mett with Polexandre and L'Illustre Bassa, both soe disguised that I who am theire old acquaintance hardly knew them, besydes that they were still soe much french in words and Phrases that twas impossible for one that understood not french to make any thing of them" (The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple , ed. G. C. Moore Smith [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928], p. 91).

[80] "[T]ell him . . . All the Blood in his Body is too little to wash away his Guilt, or to pacify my Indignation" comes out "something about washing in Blood, and you must . . . not appear before the Nation" (p. 350).

tries to suppress the textuality of the romances by actually using their language, the more it asserts itself in the density of puns and other linguistic anomalies.

Early in her relationship with Glanville, Arabella's two strategies for suppressing the gap in reading come into conflict. In an uncharacteristic moment of lucidity, she realizes that her suitorcousin's deviations from heroic behavior stem from ignorance rather than depravity, and she steps out of her role to call for the scripts that will enforce his silence. But doing this just raises the problem of the reading experience:

For heaven sake, Cousin, [Arabella exclaims,] how have you spent your Time; and to what Studies have you devoted all your Hours, that you could find none to spare for the Perusal of Books from which all useful Knowledge may be drawn; which give us the most shining Examples of Generosity, Courage, Virtue, and Love; which regulate our Actions, form our Manners, [and so forth]? (p. 48)

It soon becomes clear, though, as Glaville confronts the formidable material reality of the romances (the ten volumes of The Grand Cyrus alone ran to fifteen thousand pages), that his "spare" time will be insufficient to the task.

Arabella having ordered one of her Women to bring Cleopatra, Cassandra, Clelia , and the Grand Cyrus , from her Library, Glanville no sooner saw the Girl return, sinking under the Weight of those voluminous Romances, but he began to tremble at the Apprehension of his Cousin laying her Commands upon him to read them; and repented of his Complaisance, which exposed him to the cruel Necessity of performing what to him appeared an Herculean Labour, or else incurring her Anger by his Refusal. (p. 49)

The episode goes on to stress the opposition between reading and being a romance hero by emphasizing that Glanville's heroic service will be purely textual. He fails in his "Herculean Labour" of reading the prescribed passages (he is preoccupied with Arabella), but he redeems himself by saving these very volumes from destruction at the hands of his uncle, who, enraged at Arabella's refusal of her

cousin, decides to burn the books. The narrator gleefully emphasizes the gap between the textual and heroic:

[Her father] went out of the Room, leaving her to bewail the Fate of so many illustrious Heroes and Heroines, who, by an Effect of a more cruel Tyranny than any they had ever experienced before, were going to be cast into the merciless Flames; which would, doubtless, pay very little Regard to the divine Beauties of the admirable Clelia , or the heroic Valour of the brave Orontes ; and the rest of those great Princes and Princesses, whose Actions Arabella proposed for the Model of hers. (p. 55)

In restoring the books, Glanville continues in the same solemn style: "Assuming . . . a Countenance as sad as he was able, he laid the Books before her; and told her, he hoped she would excuse his coming into her Presence without her Permission, since it was only to restore her those Books, whose Loss she seemed so greatly to lament" (p. 56). Literal service to the romances can only be mockheroic; thus by returning them to Arabella as books, Glanville reasserts the paradox they contain.^[81]

The textuality of the romance—that they must have been read, that they had to have been written—repeatedly disturbs Arabella, for it renders the books "historical" in ways that threaten their "truth." Although she considers them true histories, their truth does not derive simply from their factuality, from their happening to have occurred at some time in the past. As Arabella repeatedly explains, they are peculiarly true because they explain "the Nature of Things" (p. 320), which is necessarily unchangeable: "Custom . . . cannot possibly change the Nature of Virtue or Vice: And since Virtue is the chief Characteristic of a Hero, a Hero in the last Age will be a Hero in this" (p. 328). Indeed, one of Arabella's most exasperating traits is the ease with which she converts signs of textuality into signs of its transcendence. She is not bothered when the heroines seem always to be eighteen years old, no matter how many years the narration is supposed to encompass, or when heroes live or die at the mere command of the heroine. The capacity

[81] The entire episode, moreover, signals that the book we are reading, unlike the romance, is not at all threatened by its own textuality, for it is the episode in the novel that is derived most explicitly from Don Quixote .

for perpetual stasis as well as the dependence of being on merely linguistic acts (the novel's most frequent joke) clearly indicate to all the other characters in The Female Quixote that the romances are mere fictions: that the characters have no existence apart from the printed page, where they might be forever the same or just as easily drop out of existence at a word. But for Arabella these very "absurdities" constitute the hyper-reality of the stories and characters: "The Empire of Love, said she, like the Empire of Honour, is govern'd by Laws of its own, which have no Dependence upon, or Relation to any other" (p. 320). She concludes that the reality "which . . . may be collected from all the Words and Actions of . . . Heroes" is simply more real than changeable everyday life. Note that she does not speak of "collecting" "the Words and Actions of the Heroes" from books, but rather of collecting "the Nature of Things" and the "independent Sovereignty" of the romantic code of love and honor from the "Words and Actions of the Heroes." For Arabella, the textuality of the romances threatens to demote them to the historically contingent, whereas it is her task to establish them, as well as herself, as historical exempla of the eternally real. Hence she both disguises the nature of her "collecting" (reading) and turns the very signs of the romances' status as written representations into signs of their "independent Sovereignty."

Suppressing both the historical nature of the books and her own temporal being, therefore, keeps the gap internal to reading (between "the Nature of Things" and the actual process through which one knows it) from emerging and threatening Arabella with the possibility of change. Absolute stasis is what her "fidelity" to the books achieves. She cannot hear the legitimate proposal of a suitor, cannot enter the world of courtship and marriage, because to do so would be to admit that there was a time when she did not have suitors and a time when she would cease to be a heroine. All proposals are considered already accomplished and infinitely deferred, just as all stories are imagined to be already told and are consequently forever repeated. Convinced that one Mr. Selvin is desperately in love with her but refuses to admit it, indeed denies it, to escape being banished from her presence (denial being an even more transparent sign of love than silence), Arabella commands him to leave the country:

[Y]ou know Thrasimedes fell upon the same Strategem [denying his love] to no Purpose. The rigid Udosia saw thro' the Disguise, and would not dispense with . . . banishing him from Rome , as I do you from England —

How, Madam! . . . Pray, how does my staying in England affect your Ladyship's Glory?

To answer your Question with another, said Arabella, Pray how did the Stay of Thrasimedes in Rome , affect the Glory of the Empress Udosia ?

Mr. Selvin was struck dumb with this Speech, for he was not willing to be thought so deficient in the Knowledge of History, as not to be acquainted with the Reasons why Thrasimedes should not stay in Rome . (pp. 312–13)

The satire here is directed at Selvin, the ignorant man pretending a knowledge of history, who cannot refute Arabella's argument because he does not understand the nature of the books from which her information comes. Because Arabella and Selvin himself both think that he should know the story of Thrasimedes and Udosia, he cannot question its relevance, and Arabella's belief in the universal force of the stories is confirmed. The complete identity of Arabella and Udosia, Selvin and Thrasimedes, Rome and England, their existence on a single ontological and atemporal plane as mere instances of the "Nature of Things," ensures that nothing can actually happen in Arabella's life. Thus a certain naive reverence for "History" verifies her belief in the timelessness of reality and comically delays a comic resolution. All the young men Arabella encounters will be silenced; all will be, to use her favorite word, "questionless."

Only in this way can Arabella close the gap opened up in the very experience of reading the romances, a gap she experiences as a wound to her "Glory." To fill it she denies time, change, and textuality: she has always had lovers; the romances are always already read. Therefore, the first step in curing Arabella and making her willing to marry is to focus her attention on the books as books, as printed works that were written at a particular time and place. Before the stories can be recognized as fictions, their textuality must be established. In the concluding conversation between Arabella and the "doctor," Arabella blunders into the admission that she has read "these books" and begins a discussion of them as books (p. 374). Indeed, in defending herself against the

implications of the doctor's claim that such "senseless fictions . . . vitiate the Mind, and Pervert the understanding," she even makes a clear distinction between the romances and herself as their reader; she censures the "License of [the doctor's] Language, which glances from the Books upon the Readers." Of course, it was Arabella, sitting before the mirror in the opening chapter, who literally glanced from the book to its reader and thereby made the narcissistic identification that opened the gap in reading. In acknowledging that she has read the books, Arabella breaks her identification with them, and it is then an easy matter for the doctor to call their truth into question by interrogating the historical conditions of their production: "Your Ladyship knows, I suppose to what Authors these Writings are ascrib'd? . . . And at what Distance, Madam, are the Facts related in them from the Age of the Writer? . . . [Bly what accident . . . did it happen these Records and Monuments were kept universally secret to Mankind till the last Century?" (p. 375). The questions continue until Arabella admits that these stories, which have been demoted from timeless truths to historically produced texts, may indeed be fictional.

The concession to textuality allows for change, for Arabella's marriage to her cousin, and it is for this reason that marriage in The Female Quixote is so closely thematically entwined with novelistic fictionality, for both rely on imaginative excursions into the realm not of "the real" but of "the possible." Indeed, at the conclusion of this novel an ability to discern the merely possible is equated with rationality itself; the form of the dialogue between Arabella and the doctor, often condemned by critics as an antifictional surrender to the reality principle,^[82] can actually be said to have a deep affinity with fiction and thus with the state of mind required for Arabella's marriage. The dialogue is insistently, aggressively, suppositional. It is a lesson in reasoning from grounds that are only provisionally credited; even to begin, Arabella has to promise to behave as if she were not a delicate young woman (p. 371). And the deeper the

[82] See, for example, Lynch, "Romance and Realism in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote ," p. 61. A number of critics have commented upon the "patriarchal" nature of the concluding dialogue, including Langbauer, Women and Romance , p. 81; Patricia Meyer Spacks, "The Subtle Sophistry of Desire: Dr. Johnson and The Female Quixote ," p. 534; and Leland E. Warren, "Of the Conversion of Women: The Female Quixote and the Dream of Perfection," pp. 377-78.

dialogue gets into the issue of fiction, the more it stresses the use of the suppositional: "You grant [the romances], Madam, to be fictions? Sir, interrupted Arabella , eagerly, you are again infringing the Laws of Disputation. You are not to confound a Supposition of which I allow you only the present Use, with an unlimited and irrevocable Concession" (pp. 375-76). Although Arabella here is still resisting fiction, she has already "eagerly" embraced the logic on which it is founded: that one can grant the "present use" of a supposition to which one does not attach "unlimited" credit, complete belief.

To "suppose," literally to "place under," is to lay a discursive foundation for a train of thought that need not itself, as the doctor says of fiction, "claim to be credited" (p. 376). This was the conditional state of mind into which eighteenth-century novel heroines were constantly being invited by the question "Could you love Mr. ––––?" The question "Do you love?" could not be posed since a woman was not allowed to have sentiments before being asked. The first step in a marital exchange was thus the pos ing of the question about an emotional poss ibility. If we can allow ourselves, for a moment, to "glance from the books to the readers," we might speculate that fiction, simply as fiction, helped women reach this state of conditional emotional being by inviting readers to sympathize with characters because they were fictional and then requiring them to cease feeling the transferred emotions upon closing the book because, after all, characters are only fictional. Such a deliberate creation of emotional discontinuity allows for a separate dimension of affective life, one in which emotions were only "practiced," in which the feelings themselves take on the same suppositional, conjectural status as the "nobody" in whom they supposedly originate. Such emotional "practice" would have been especially important for women in an age when the new affective demands of family life came into conflict with the still prevalent belief that women were not to love before they were beloved. It is not, then, surprising that Arabella's practice of suppositional logic, her acknowledgment of fiction, and her acceptance of the match with her cousin should swiftly succeed each other.

By thus linking fiction and family formation, the novel makes the continuous succession of generations seem dependent on suppositional, textual interruptions of continuous female identity. To

read a fiction knowingly (that is, sympathetically), it implies, is to seek that very discontinuity in the experience of reading and being that Arabella could not abide. As Johnson explains sympathy in the Rambler , it always entails a suspension of disbelief for a defined period; it is hence closely allied with the experience of textuality Arabella suppressed:

All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of the imagination, that realizes the event however fictitious, or approximates it however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate; so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves.^[83]

For Johnson, the essence of sympathy is the "deception," lasting only "for a time ," that we are placed "in the condition" of another; sympathy simply is an illusion that comes to an end, and hence reading and ceasing to read novels, which are doubly illusionary because at once fictional and possible, would be particularly salient instances of the general experience of sympathizing. The temporality of reading, its creation of the break in our experience of ourselves that Arabella dreaded and denied, becomes its own glory, and so does our very capacity for "lending" ourselves to an imaginary entity.

Like many early novels, The Female Quixote parodically represents naive reading as reading that does not know how to stop. One lesson to be learned from such satires is that naive identification is ultimately egotistical. This lesson is especially true in Arabella's case, since, as the doctor declares, "It is impossible to read [romances] without lessening part of that Humility, which by preserving in us a Sense of our Alliance with all human nature, keeps us awake to Tenderness and Sympathy, or without impairing that Compassion which is implanted in us" (p. 381). That is, Arabella's identification with the heroines limits her ability to sympathize with almost everyone else. But the subtler lesson is that Arabella's resistance to the fictionality of fiction gives her no practice in the various modes of having emotions, trying them out, holding them

[83] Rambler , no. 60, pp. 318–19. For a thorough discussion of Johnson's conceptions of empathy in reading, see Edward Tomarken, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: The Discipline of Criticism (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991).

in a speculative, tentative, and above all temporary way, without making an "unlimited, irrevocable concession" to them.

Learning to hold and release nobody's sentiments by reading fiction, therefore, could easily have helped women conform their emotional lives to the exigencies of property exchange. The marriageable woman could then become an abstract variable, an emotional potential who occupied many different, but never quite "real," sentimental states in turn. To be sure, this process of temporarily de-realizing one's sentiments might also have been instrumental in shaping (or, more precisely, hollowing out) that generalized subject of exchange, the commercial mind. In the same number of the Rambler quoted above, Johnson intimates as much while remarking (in a Humean vein) on the difficulty of sympathy: "[T]he man whose faculties have been engrossed by business, and whose heart never fluttered but at the rise and fall of stocks, wonders how the attention can be seized, or the affections agitated by a tale of love."^[84] Here the man of business and the feminine or feminized sentimental reader of love stories are juxtaposed in a way that reveals their abstract similarity: both hearts "flutter" to a set of signs that, although not personally addressed to them, seize and agitate them, inviting or discouraging an investment for a defined term. Each has entered that suppositional mental space where beings who are nobody in particular (the conglomerate shareholders' mind represented by the variation of numbers attached to a stock, and the fictional lovers) provisionally solicit identification. As readers, they both speculate.

The release into the culture of strongly marked overtly suppositional identities, belonging to nobody and hence temporarily appropriate to anybody, therefore, should be seen as one among many modes of facilitating property exchange and investment in the period, of creating the speculative, commercial and sentimental subject. But we should, nevertheless, recall the difference between the masculine and feminine versions of this subject. The commercial man is imagined to undergo spells of suppositional self-suspension in order to invest profitably and increase his property, but representations of property exchange involving women frequently stress that they lose whatever property they had previously owned.

[84] Johnson, p. 391.

The Female Quixote is a case in point; as long as Arabella refuses fiction, resists the suppositional, she owns her estate, but when she capitulates to textuality, she becomes the vehicle through which the estate descends from her father to his chosen male heir, her cousin. When Arabella understands the books as mere representations, in other words, she understands her "real-life" function as a representation, as a means of transferring and preserving the property by giving herself away. Thus a woman's practice in sympathizing with nobody was a peculiarly fitting prelude to disposing of, rather than increasing, her own material substance.

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When fiction was asserted to be at once a form of authorial property and nobody's story, when women were supposedly learning (through the very fictions the female author claimed as property and promoted as freely appropriable) to disclaim property, where did the married woman author stand in relation to her commodities? If fiction had its roots, as I have been arguing, in both the property claims of authors and the sentimental dispossession of women, then Charlotte Lennox, as a married woman author of fiction, was caught in a hopeless contradiction, at once asserting her author's right by her invention and recommending that women trade their property claims for sentimental identifications. But I wish to argue, in this concluding section, that the very contradictions in Lennox's career enable us to focus with peculiar intensity on the general paradoxes of authorial property in the period. Indeed, I hope to show that Lennox was something of an emblematic figure for her male contemporaries, a representation of deserving, dispossessed authorship, who resembled a fictional nobody in her availability for sympathetic appropriation.

In many ways, her situation was like that of other novelists. Since the normal condition of getting a novel published was selling the copyright, with no provision for royalties, the author was usually dispossessed of any legal claim to the text by the time it appeared in print. Moreover, since even quite popular novels were seldom reprinted after the lapse of the original fourteen-year copyright, few novelists could look forward to the resale of the copyright they were legally entitled to make. The Statute of Anne created the

sense of a constantly elusive rightful property by giving the author the original copyright, a right that she had to alienate immediately since she normally could not afford to exercise it by printing her own work. Authors in general, we might say, were in the "feminized" position of perpetuating themselves only by renouncing their property.

Moreover, the consciousness of dispossession seems to have been increased by the temporariness of copyright, not only because novelists seldom struck a second bargain and thus felt mocked by the return of a right that had been drained of its marketability, but also because the law encouraged some writers to cherish hopes of bringing out profitable subscription editions of their earlier works. If copyright had been perpetual, if the law had allowed it to be an absolute property that could be alienated forever, Charlotte Lennox, for example, could never have made her repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to republish by subscription: first, an illustrated edition of The Female Quixote (proposals advertised in 1773-74); second, an edition of her collected works (proposals advertised in 1775); and third, a revised edition of Shakespeare Illustrated (proposals advertised in 1793). The proposals for these editions, as we saw earlier in the chapter, invited potential subscribers to help Lennox recoup the profits that should have been hers all along. Such language, not unusual in subscription proposals, contributed mightily to the pathos of authorship in the period. Because of its limited term, therefore, copyright was a commodity one was generally forced to alienate but one that did not simply go away; it regularly came back, and hence it haunted Lennox as an unrealizable potential that only gave her occasions for advertising her impotence.

Both women and authors in the period were frequently presented as doomed to dispossession: they were both identified with, indeed identified by, things that were no longer theirs. Moreover, the female author, especially the married female author, by being doubly dispossessed, could easily serve as a hyperbolic instance of authorial suffering. Charlotte Lennox's marriage seems to have put her in just this category. As we saw at the opening of the chapter, having a husband guaranteed her a certain respectability that allowed her to mix "innocently" in the society of literary London. But the shadowy Alexander Lennox who was employed by the

printer William Strahan in 1747,^[85] when he married Charlotte Ramsay, was generally understood to be a drain on her resources. Soliciting money from the Royal Literary Fund in 1793, she called him "a husband whose fortune I have made by the sacrifice of my own,"^[86] "sacrifice" here probably referring to her decision to seek an office for her husband instead of a pension for herself when she was offered aid by the duke of Newcastle sometime in the early 1760s. According to a contemporary account, Newcastle proposed the pension, but she "very politely declined in favour of her husband, for whom she solicited a place, which the Duke promised to procure him at the first opportunity."^[87] A 1760 letter to the duchess of Newcastle, quoted earlier in the chapter, provides additional verification for this story and indicates that Lennox expected her husband's place to free her from the drudgery of hack work:

I have the comfort to hear from Mr. Stone that Your Grace continues Your favourable intentions with regard to Mr. Lennox, and this hope supports me in my present slavery to the Booksellers, whom I have the more mortification to see adding to their heaps by my labours, which scarce produce me a scanty and precarious subsistence.^[88]

Her understanding that she had won her husband's place for him by years of literary labor was also implicit in her gesture of sending her works to the commissioner of customs just after the appointment was made, a gesture the commissioner seems to have considered somewhat indelicate:

Sr. Wm. Musgrave makes his Compliments to Mrs. Lennox & is much obliged to her for the very agreable present of her writings which he accepts & values for their Intrinsic Merit—He is sorry she sho[uld] think any acknowledgements necessary for the little Distinctions which he may have had it in his power to shew Mr. Lennox

[85] This information comes from Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox , p. 14. Alexander Lennox is not mentioned in J. A. Cochrane, Dr. Johnson's Printer: The Life of William Strahan (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), so it is improbable that he held an important position at the printer's.

[86] Quoted in Small, p. 59.

[87] Anonymous, "Memoirs of Mrs. Lenox," Edinburgh Weekly Magazine 58 (October 9, 1783): 35.

[88] Quoted in Small, p. 28.

& which are entirely due to the very good Character he has heard of him.^[89]

In 1765, Lennox gave birth to a daughter, and there was a four-year gap in her publishing record, suggesting that in the first few years after receiving "the place of tidewaiter in the Customs"^[90] her husband did actually support her. But correspondence from the late sixties and early seventies attests both that his income was inadequate and that his place had cost her more than the proffered pension. Known as a Newcastle placeman, Alexander seems to have become a liability in Charlotte Lennox's continuing efforts to obtain patronage from the "fine Ladys" of the new Bedford administration.^[91] In the 1790s, the Lennoxes appear to have separated, and Charlotte was given only a small amount of the yearly income she had obtained for her husband. In the last years of her life (1803–04), her husband dead, she became the first regular pensioner of the Royal Literary Fund, which had been established to assist worthy but impecunious authors.^[92]

To her contemporaries, therefore, Lennox seemed to have been doubly dispossessed, prevented by both the conditions of the marketplace and the parasitism of her husband from receiving the just rewards of her authorship. Of course, even if Alexander had been frugal and industrious, Charlotte Lennox's properties would

[89] Sir William Musgrave to Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, Wednesday, June 5, 1765, published in "The Lennox Collection," ed. Duncan Isles, Harvard Library Bulletin 19 (January 1971): 56–57, item 23.

[90] Quoted by Duncan Isles in his discussion of these arrangements in "The Lennox Collection," p. 59 n. 121, item 24.

[91] In a 1769 letter responding to Lennox's apparent request for advice about dedicating a "performance" of The Sisters to a "great personage," James Murray wrote, "My Wife [Countess Gower's sister] has no Interest, for the same reason that the protection of a Noble Lord was withdrawn from you /viz:/ on account of Mr. Lennox having got a Place from the late Duke of Newcastle so all I can say is, that when your performance is to [be] Acted, I shall with pleasure attend it, with as many of my acquaintances as I can prevail upon to go & I most sincerely wish it may meet with the most favourable Reception. . . ." Duncan Isles suggests that Lennox was planning to dedicate a subscription publication of The Sisters to the unnamed "great personage," but he uses the word "performance" for both the thing to be dedicated and Mrs. Lennox's benefit night, indicating that the scheme was to get a large sum of money out of an individual who would preside over the third night in a special manner. James Murray to Charlotte Lennox, Wednesday, February 8, 1769, in "The Lennox Collection," pp. 57–60, item 24.

[92] Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), p. 170; Cross discusses the earnings of a variety of women writers in this period on pp. 168–74.

technically have been her husband's anyway; she would still, that is, have made his fortune at the expense of her own. She was conscious of this fact when she wrote to Johnson in 1777, announcing that "Mr. Lennox is so desirous of recovering his property out of the hands of the booksellers that he gives me leave to take any measures that shall be judged proper—it will be necessary to have the advice of some gentleman of the law."^[93] The property of Mr. Lennox referred to here turns out to be the copyright of his wife's translation of the Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune, Duke of Sully , a standard history, the "copy" of which was still quite valuable more than fourteen years after its original publication. Two previous pirated Scottish editions of the translation had no doubt already stimulated Charlotte Lennox's sense of economic injury. Another letter to Johnson in 1778 makes the situation clearer:

I saw Mr. Dodsley yesterday, and he told me they had printed another edition of Sully's Memoirs—I apprehend they had no right to do this without my consent, it is more than fourteen years since that book was first published; and about a year ago, I offerd to give them my corrected copy for a reasonable consideration, which Dodsley in the name of the partners refused—and now they have reprinted it without consulting me although by the late decision concerning literary property^[94] the copy is mine.^[95]

"The copy is mine" and therefore due for resale; when the booksellers refused to recompense the author for the second sale of her right, Mr. Lennox stepped in with a lawsuit to claim his property. Charlotte Lennox then briefly floated the idea of taking her corrected version to a printer and publishing it herself "in numbers":

I have some reason to hope that I may have success by publishing it in this manner, as the purchase will be so much easier—but I must be speedy . . . it will be necessary I suppose to draw up a little address to the publick explaining my reasons for publishing Sully myself, and in this manner—this favour I earnestly entreat of you [Johnson].^[96]

[93] Letter reprinted in Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox , p. 50.

[94] Lennox refers to the 1774 decision in the House of Lords against perpetual copyright.

[95] Quoted in Small, p. 52.

[96] Quoted in Small, p. 52.

Dodsley's partners thus stubbornly maintained their ownership of Charlotte Lennox's property, and against them Mr. Lennox asserted his ownership. Meanwhile, the author hoped for a rival self-published edition and asked Johnson, as usual, to impersonate her authorial voice and address the public, as he had so often before, in her name.

A compromise was finally reached with Dodsley,^[97] but the conflict itself is instructive since it so neatly illustrates Lennox's double dispossession as well as the use she seems to have made of it. Lennox's property, when it was unjustly appropriated, could only be reclaimed as her husband's; direct access and control over what was acknowledged by common parlance to be "hers" was obstructed by two different arrangements of estrangement. When we add to this combination Lennox's notorious ne'er-do-well husband, we can begin to see how Charlotte Lennox became the center of a remarkable circle of (mostly male) collaborators and promoters. Her lack of full ownership of herself and her works seems to have multiplied her agents in literary London. The casual way in which she prevails on Johnson to "draw up a little address to the publick explaining my reasons" typifies Lennox's manner of distributing the tasks of her authorship. The publication of "The Lennox Collection" (letters to Lennox from her contemporaries) provides ample evidence of the collaborative nature of many of her productions. Richardson helped her revise The Female Quixote and partly negotiated the sale of the copy to Millar; Johnson also negotiated on her behalf, wrote the dedications to many of her works, and may have written the last chapter of The Female Quixote. Shakespeare Illustrated was assisted by Johnson and John Boyle, the earl of Orrery; both these men and a few others worked on her translation of Pierre Brumoy's Théâtre des Grecs (1760); she asked for Garrick's help in revising her plays; the eleven numbers of her Lady's Magazine (1760–61) were also by several hands; and in the 1790s we find James Boswell writing proposals for a subscription edition of Shakespeare Illustrated . If we include not only people who collaborated on the works but also those who championed her cause with booksellers, patrons, or the public, the list gets much longer. As the editor of

[97] For an account of the compromise, see Bloom, Samuel Johnson in Grub Street , pp. 230–31.

the "The Lennox Collection" has remarked, "The most unusual aspect of these letters as a literary discovery is . . . that here we see so many eminent men of letters all writing to, and being engaged in the problems of one person—and a relatively obscure person at that."^[98]

Lennox's relative obscurity and the extraordinary common exertion made on her behalf by "so many eminent men of letters" seem to me but two sides of the same coin. In dealing with her peers, Lennox frequently stressed her inability to own her works; and since they were never going to be completely hers, she seems to have had little compunction about asking others to share the labor of composing them. Writing to Garrick in 1768, for example, she presents her play, The Sisters , as a piece both originally inspired by her correspondent and completely open to his revision: "You will find that I have pursued a hint you gave me some years ago, which has furnished me with one of the most interesting incidents in the whole piece; you may depend upon it that every alteration, and amendment which you judge necessary, will be readily, and thankfully admitted."^[99] Indeed, the script seems to have been literally open-ended: "I have not yet written the concluding lines, but that can be done, when the piece has received your corrections." Authorial collaboration, moreover, is to result not so much in a public success as in the collective patronage of her "friends": "[B]y accepting it you will . . . put it in the power of my friends to serve me, in a way which they have often wishd to serve me, and often recommended to me."^[100] Lennox's authorship of the play is presented as her friends' idea: a convenient opportunity for them to rally around and pay her what they imagined somebody else (her husband or the booksellers) really owed. This is not to say that Charlotte Lennox was the only author in London who sought either collaboration or occasions, such as subscription editions or author's benefit performances, on which her friends might serve her. We may think of the "Age of Authorship" as a time when writers were individuated with biographies and dignified as proprietors, but the elusive nature of literary property that encouraged Lennox to rely

[98] Duncan Isles, "Introduction to The Lennox Collection," Harvard Library Bulletin 18 (October 1970): 323.

[99] Quoted in Small, p. 36.

[100] Quoted in Small, p. 36.

on the kindness of friends, even as she insisted on her rights and complained of her dispossession, led many writers to ignore in practice the principles of authorial self-reliance they proclaimed. Did Lady Vane write the "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality" that occupy the center of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle ? Did Sarah Fielding help write chapters 4 and 5 of book 2 of Joseph Andrews ? Did Johnson write the climactic penultimate chapter of The Female Quixote ? That scholars continue to debate these questions attests to the general diffuseness of authorship in the period.

What does seem to distinguish "our Charlotte," as Johnson called her, was the skill with which she broadcast her dispossession and thereby invited the investment of time, labor, and money in her career. As an author, in other words, she functioned rather like one of her own fictional characters. Johnson, for example, was required to "stand in her place" whenever he impersonated her in a dedication or introductory address, and he is never more "the author of the Female Quixote " than when calling attention to some deficiency in her experience or being: "My Sex , my Age ," he writes for her, "have not given me many Opportunities of mingling in the World."^[101] The very lack he mentions here is the occasion for the sympathetic identification that motivates him to write the preface for her. He supplies her need both in the sense that he creates it as a part of her public persona and in the sense that he compensates for it by making it rhetorically effective. Lennox thus became a type of the author of the age in much the same way that nobody became everybody's common relative: by standing for a definitive lack of property. She was celebrated, sympathized with, puffed, pitied, and impersonated because she could never become her own person.

[101] Shakespeare Illustrated , p. viii.