the guy typically credited with
inventing what we know as the modern
novel
was miguel de cervantes with his
cumbersome 800 plus
page book don quixote but what if i told
you that the real antecedent for the
modern novel was created by
ladies
[Music]
before the rise of what would become the
modern novel there was
amatory fiction amatory fiction was a
genre of fiction that became popular in
britain in the late 17th
and early 18th centuries as its name
implies
amatory fiction is preoccupied with
sexual love and romance
most of its works were short stories it
was dominated by women
and women were the ones responsible for
sharing and promoting their own work
there are quite a few ladies we could
discuss but today we are going to focus
on the big three
the literary lady squad that was dubbed
the fair triumvirate of wit
made up of eliza haywood de la revere
manly
and alfred ben clara reeve an english
gothic novelist
wrote about the history of prose fiction
in the progress of romance
and mentions with some shade the french
and spanish romance
and the writing of mrs benn mrs manley
and mrs haywood
so even as early as the 18th century as
people were documenting who was crafting
the trajectory of the written word
women were very much being noted what
makes amatory fiction so interesting and
probably why it's been forgotten to the
sands of time
was that these were stories about women
by women that explored their sexuality
their pleasures and the limits of
autonomy they were allowed to have in
their lives
you know before the puritanical era of
the victorian prudes and
just general haters came along in the
typical ruined woman lady plot
young innocent woman ends up meeting a
handsome probably dark haired man
who never smiles and only ever grins or
smirks
she is seduced and later on deceived by
said dark-haired man
and ends up ruined for having sex
outside of wedlock
reinforcing the notion that a woman's
value is based around her virginity
and purity and it can be taken from her
then
she had to throw herself off a cliff
because now she has nothing to offer the
world
well amatory fiction asks but what if
she
just liked the sex and didn't die some
of the time
amatory fiction was considered immoral
by the standards of the day
because it allowed women to have
scandalous love affairs without being
punished because women are not allowed
to feel pleasure without consequences
the contemporary dismissal is part of
the reason why these stories and the
authors involved in them
were not given their due credit for the
rise of the novel so much so that later
18th century female writers like francis
bernie
really wanted to distance themselves
from the raunchy concept of female
authorship
they weren't like other female writers
see they were cool writers who wrote
hyper realistic stories about women on
the cusp of being rich if you know they
could just
marry wealthy relatable everyday content
in novel romance and popular fiction in
the first half of the 18th century by
dieter schulz
schultz argues that the works of the
three big people you might have heard of
daniel defoe author of robinson crusoe
samuel richardson
author of clarissa and henry fielding
author of tom jones
should be viewed as a reaction against
the kind of romanticized novel or
novella
produced by writers such as aphra ben
dela revere manly
and eliza haywood rather than as an
alternative to the tradition of
high romance presented by the heroic
romances of the 17th century
daniel defoe with his 1722 novel maul
flanders
made sure to set up his stories as
private histories
that were telling a more realistic
weighty story and were not
idle aka no fun hot girl summer here
even back then male critics were very
glad to dismiss the concept of a happily
ever after
as fluff all three members of the wit
squad were widely read and
haywood's love in excess was after
gulliver's travels in robinson crusoe
one of the most popular works of fiction
of the era yet
we still read these other two works you
know mostly abridged but
still so it's 1792 and mary
wallstonecraft has just published a
vindication of the rights of woman
and the dudes are super salty male
critics already think that women who
have succeeded
in literature only did so because men
gave them permission to do so
as jane spencer explains the public
reception of wallstone crafts the rights
of women
plainly demonstrates that women writers
had been accepted only on condition that
they remained within a limited
feminine sphere and did not disturb
men's dominance of
the real world outside it women we have
often placed near the throne of
literature
wrote the critical reviewer of
wollstonecraft's work but
if they seize it forgetful of our
fondness we can hurl them from it
yikes and the way most women worked this
power play was by working satire and
political commentary into their works
what were some of these saucy stories
about well
let's see one of aphra ben's most
scandalous novels was the history of the
nun
or the fair vowel breaker this ben novel
is about a young woman named isabella
who is the daughter of a count who was
sent to a nunnery when her mother dies
she ends up falling in love with this
guy named hanolt breaks her vows as a
nun and commits some petty thievery
which gets her husband disowned so he
eventually joins the army
and is eventually presumed dead so she
ends up marrying a rich dude named
villanoys
who was in love with her from way back
when however
hinol ends up coming back and isabella
smothers him to death and dismoses up
the body
because she's afraid of being shamed for
committing bigamy
um murder is worse
isabella has such a good reputation
however she almost gets away with it
but ends up confessing and is executed
before she is put to death however she
gives an impassioned speech that makes
everyone go you know
she's a pretty cool lady suck she has to
die
phantomina or love in a maze by eliza
haywood
is about this nameless highbrow woman
who ends up having a dollyance with a
man after a night at the theater
the man called boo plessier
ends up getting bored and doing the 1725
version of
ghosting in response the protagonist
dons three different disguises to keep
seducing
until they both end up getting bored
with each other the story ends with our
protagonist
eventually getting pregnant and being
forced by her mother to confess all this
to beau plesilla
beau plessier offers her marriage and
her response is
no so our heroine gets sent off to a
french nunnery
meanwhile boo placia has to deal with
the fact that he is very very very
gullible kathleen luby in eliza
haywood's animatory aesthetic writes
haywood chooses amatory content not only
as a call to a sexually attuned audience
but as a mode of immersing her readers
in states of extreme aesthetic
engagement
that acquaint them with human experience
with an intensity no other material can
far from being a degraded form of
sensationalist writing
amatory fiction contains the most
instructive potential for eliciting
readers affect
and calling their attention to the
implications of that affect
these stories all have different endings
but all of them show a woman struggling
in a system that very much wants them to
be passive actors in their own story
they seek love romance sex and adventure
each of these texts is on the heroine
side and even if they were forced to
have non-radical endings at times
the fact that it gives voice to these
desires is radical
english scholar tony o'shaughnessy
bowers explains
ben manley haywood and their peers were
writing for women
increasingly cut off from the world
outside the domestic circle
that world was they knew full of traps
late especially for them
even the smallest error could result in
permanent social alienation
under these circumstances amatory
fiction provided augustine women with a
sense of involvement in the outside
world
which for all its dangers and
disappointments had great advantages
over restrictive domesticity
while allowing them to maintain a safe
distance from it even marriage in these
books is treated as something a woman
has to want
rather than a reward for good behavior
as it is in samuel richardson's pamela
or the history of sir charles grandison
in 1753
mary wardley montague remarked
richardson is so eager for the
multiplication of marriages
i suppose he is some parish curate whose
chief prophet
depends on weddings and christenings for
those who are not aware that is a
soft drag it is not a read but these
women weren't just writing lust tales
for the sake of it
interwoman was heavy political satire in
the new atlantis an influential
political satire by de la river manly
which have the goddesses justice and
virtue on earth witnessing
all kinds of human nastiness such as
orgies seduction and assault
just terrible well it mocked several
members of the wig party including
sarah churchill who was then a favorite
of the queen in fact the scandal and
public fever around manly's writing was
particularly impactful in damaging the
relationship between sarah churchill and
queen anne
although they decided not to include
that in the favorite for some reason
manly ended up being arrested but she
was adamant that the figures in the book
were
totally fictional you guys and
eventually the charges were dropped so
it couldn't be liable
so there professor of english katherine
gallagher explains of manly's work
the allegorical style favored by manly
for example
involved telling scandalous stories
about recognizable real persons
with the name and some circumstances
altered the stories were given distant
historical exotic or mythical settings
and were often interspersed with stories
lacking apparent reference
what manley gained from the allegorical
necessity of altering and therefore
inventing circumstances
was a representational density that
enabled especially effective libel
manley's talent was for crafting the
invented circumstances
into what we would now call a
novelistically satisfying story
one read for its own sake as well as for
its scandalous referentiality
so if these women were so impactful and
interesting to the point where they
ruined
semi-gay royal relationships why aren't
they more well-known
well it was because they were raunchy
other female authors of the time
didn't want to be associated with the
fair triumvirate who were also called
prostitutes of the pen william warner an
english essayist wrote
the incorporation of the novel of
amorous intrigue within the elevated
novel of the 1740s
in for example pamela joseph andrews
clarissa and tom jones
is one of the means by which old
pleasures are disowned and forgotten
in their novels of the 1740s richardson
and fielding promote this forgetting
first by defacing the novel of amorous
intrigue and then by providing their own
novels as replacements for novels they
characterize as degraded and immoral
these new novels overwrite by disavowing
but appropriating
tossing out but recycling the novels
they spurn
it wasn't until early feminists and
other female authors like virginia woolf
rediscovered them
that history started giving these ladies
their due the works of these women are
being studied more but due to the racy
subject matter
most people only ever hear of these
women in college or graduate school
despite the work they did to help
develop what we now know of the english
novel
they are still under-loved and
under-appreciated much like
amy adams at the oscars when we talk
about female authorship we can always
pull out the big guns
your brontes austins alcotts
wolves but that is just such a small
cafeteria table
when the reality is that there was a
whole school of female writers who not
only wrote
but did it well enough to set the
standard to quote virginia woolf
all women together ought to let flowers
fall upon the tomb of aphra ben
which is most scandalously but rather
appropriately
in westminster abbey for it was she who
earned them the right to speak their
minds
girl i'm not gonna say girl
murder is worse um