Abstract
The scholarly focus in British and American women’s literary history has largely been on courtship and seduction novels, and thus on the courtship—or seduction and fall—of innocent young girls before marriage. Consequently, we have tended to treat as courtship novels even works such as A Simple Story (1791), where the heroine has an adulterous affair so shattering that it severs not only the filiation of generations, but the book itself, or to regard as seduction novels even works such as The Coquette (1797), where the heroine commits adultery—has sexual intercourse and a baby—with a married man. But novels of adultery, which began in England with Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87), followed a different trajectory from courtship novels,1 and responded to different domestic issues and public debates. In the Atlantic world, this was most evident during the last decades of the eighteenth century.
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Notes
Bill Overton, Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684–1800: Theories and Circumtexts (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
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Lafayette’s novel was much reprinted in England during the seventeenth century, reissued in A Select Collection of Novels (London, 1722), then edited, revised, and reissued by Elizabeth Griffith in 1777.
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© 2012 Toni Bowers and Tita Chico
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Bannet, E.T. (2012). Adulterous Sentiments in Transatlantic Domestic Fiction, c. 1770–1805. In: Bowers, T., Chico, T. (eds) Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014610_2
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