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While paternal metaphors befit stories of the transmission of literary tradition, fraternal metaphors predominate at times of literary innovation. Through case studies of two sets of triangular literary relations - between Henry and Sarah Fielding and Samuel Richardson, and between William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - this chapter argues that both the establishment of the novel as a serious genre and the inauguration of the Romantic revolution were events shaped by relationships combining biological brother-sister relations and literary brotherhood and sisterhood. It contrasts the place accorded the sister in the early novel tradition, as feminine fellow-practitioner and as weapon deployed by rival males, with her place within early Romantic discourse as a link to Nature and a source of matter to be shaped by a masculine poetic spirit.

This chapter investigates how Sarah Fielding develops the kind of writing that leads readers to engage with the novel in a mode of reading that is both immersed and reflective. It traces this project through Fielding’s comments on novel reading in her critical writings, her translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, and her own experimental metafiction in the 1750s (also in collaboration with Jane Collier). Fielding, it is shown, brings novel reading and its immersive qualities into conversation with the debates between the ancients and the moderns and the transhistorical perspectives arising from the mock-heroic mode. Also the theatre, and in particular Fielding’s engagement with Shakespeare, is shown to contribute to her bid to create the kind of novel that can both immerse readers and make them think.

This chapter surveys the English novel in the pivotal decade of the 1740s. Besides the landmark novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding also pushed a didactic conception of the novel, more concerned with moral issues than with meticulous description, and her term ‘Moral Romance’ aptly characterizes not only much of her own work but also that of several other contemporaries, such as Mary Collyer and the later Eliza Haywood. Decidedly less moralistic fiction also flourished in the last years of the decade, with Tobias Smollett’s first novel and the controversial publication of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. By 1750, a new repertoire of possibilities for the novel was opening up, and that year alone saw the publication of several innovative works, including the anonymous The History of Charlotte Summers, and first novels by Sarah Scott, Charlotte Lennox, and Robert Paltock.

One of the activities within classical scholarship which long attracted women excluded from formal education or academic institutions was translation. Although some women translated for money, others did so for pleasure, in order to alleviate boredom, to stimulate their intellects, and provide relief from domestic responsibilities and drudgery. This chapter looks at pleasure as a motive for female scholarly activity and translation in Early Modern English treatises on women’s education, especially those by Bathsua Makin and Mary Astell, before conducting a comparative discussion of two important translations by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English women, Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius and Sarah Fielding’s Xenophon.

This chapter explores the aspects that form novels of sentiment in the eighteenth century. The form of consciousness encountered in the book A Sentimental Journey shot off and created a novelistic subgenre of its own: the sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility. Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1769) is the best-known example of the form. The sentimental is a type of novel that is meant to arouse as well as to render sympathetic feelings. Mackenzie, however, did not originate the form. Before him was Sarah Fielding's David Simple (1744) and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753). Both Fielding's and Mackenzie's works contain abundant satiric elements, often criticizing the greed, vanity, and selfishness in a financially oriented society. And although satire is not often associated with sentimentality—which is supposed to celebrate tender feelings—satire rejects tenderness for criticism; Fielding's work was important in creating a sense of sensitivity to the misfortunes of others, a factor that encouraged other so-called sentimentalists.

This chapter explores adventure novels, which were prevalent during the eighteenth century, such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (1754), wherein Fielding acknowledged that adventure easily arouses the reader's interest. For early novelists, writing was pursued mainly as a means to earn money. Authors were impelled to make a living from writing that needed to engage paying audiences, and adventure seemed to be able to supply an obvious hook. The chapter then explores the aspects and elements that form and create the adventure novel, how they reflect and comment on society, and how they helped develop and proliferate the genre of the novel. Delarivier Manley, for example, published The New Atlantis, which makes use of a mythological frame, fictional names, and liberal exaggeration in order to disguise its political purpose as a weapon to attack the Whig Party.