Blackwell Reference Online

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In Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance (1785) the character Euphrasia defends Samuel Richardson against the charge that he makes young women “wiredraw their language,” arguing that they “improve” by reading, unlike the “ladies of the last age.” “Truly,” answers her friend Sophronia, “for their studies were the French and Spanish Romances, and the writings of Mrs Behn, Mrs Manly, and Mrs Heywood” (1785: I, 138). Reeve's praise of Richardson at the expense of earlier romances follows a contemporary trend. Still read in the century's opening decades, the “vast French romances, neatly gilt” gradually experienced a decline in status. Attacks on the epistemology of romance became commonplace, notably in the prefaces of defensive mid to late eighteenth-century novelists. Literary historians both presented the prose romance as an outdated form and underplayed its importance; in her essay “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing” Anna Letitia Barbauld describes The Grand Cyrus and Clelia as “novels,” implying their desultory nature: “Some adventures and a love story was all they aimed at” (1810: I, 37). This denigration of romance continues in the sometimes triumphalist twentieth-century accounts of the rise of the novel. In spite of a growing interest in romance's relation to discourses of nationalism and romanticism, critics represented the eighteenth-century romance as a poor cousin ... log in or subscribe to read full text