The first sentence of Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751) announces the life of a marriage as its plot: “The various accidents which befel a very worthy couple, after their uniting in the state of matrimony, will be the subject of the following history.” The novel, however, curiously commences, not with the story of a wife, but with an embedded tale of seduction. Why does the plot of life-after-marriage begin with Miss Mathews's story of seduction? Amelia is not the only novel in the second half of the eighteenth century that both takes the history of a marriage as its primary focus and centrally includes an embedded narrative of seduction. This chapter analyzes three such novels – Fielding's Amelia, Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and Elizabeth Griffith's The History of Lady Barton (1771). My interest lies in the relation between the ostensibly extraneous digression into a seduction tale and the stated primary plot of the eponymous heroine's life after marriage. What place does seduction have in the lives of wives? Married women, by definition, are no longer sexually innocent and their erotic knowledge renders them beyond the power of seduction. For this reason, married heroines who are also victims of seduction are rare, yet seduction, I argue, is central to their stories. Wives are frequently the sympathetic listeners to other women's seduction tales and this chapter reads these scenes of story-telling to think about what the embedded narratives add to the primary tale.

In the decades following the publication of Clarissa, as this book has traced, the seduction plot turned the problem of how to read the new signs of love into narrative form, telling many different stories about women's failure to recognize both internal and external significations. By representing a female-centered semiotics of love as uncharted territory, these tales did not always already contain the end of a restrictive passive femininity nor did their stories dictate a proper domesticated desire. The 1790s, however, mark a shift in seduction's story and my claim is no longer entirely tenable. Culture's obsession with the seduction plot disappears at the beginning of the nineteenth century and this chapter argues that it did so because it takes on a static meaning within the political wars of the 1790s, one that replaces affective truth with political truth as the problem that the narrative promises to resolve. The revolutionary politics of the 1790s changed seduction's significations, displacing its epistemological pursuit of how a woman knows her own heart into a political allegory that presupposes a singular and fixed understanding of that heart. Through an analysis of four feminist novels from the end of the century – Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art (1796), Mary Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman (1798), Mary Hays's Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Amelia Opie's Father and Daughter (1801) – I argue that their melodramatic tone exposes the static understanding of female sexuality that was becoming dominant through seduction's political tellings.

“My fortune is not equal to your merit,” declares the reformed aristocratic seducer of “Virtue in Distress” (1770) as he proposes to Eliza, a beautiful and virtuous humble laborer. The sentiment that a woman's individual merit provides her with a dowry out-valuing the money of a man of fortune becomes newly comprehensible within the later eighteenth-century's affective landscape. When individual feeling takes precedence over traditional kinship structures in uniting love with marriage, laboring-class women are theoretically poised to profit the most from companionate marriage's implied revolutionary economics. Samuel Richardson's infamous Pamela (1740) was the first text to turn the Cinderella fairy tale into a realistic narrative in which a laboring-class heroine's virtue could be rewarded with both the love and the hand of her upper-class seducer. Though the story, as historians have demonstrated, was not grounded in probable reality, the ‘virtue rewarded’ narrative becomes newly recognizable as a mimetic tale. This chapter focuses on seduction narratives that have poor heroines but ones that, unlike Pamela, circulated within street literature, and asks what function the repetition of seduction serves when it is directed at a laboring-class readership. What happens to Pamela's story when it is told not within a sentimental novel but in prose narrative chapbooks and in popular ballads? Two major differences appear when we turn from novels to cheap print: one, the plot of seduction in street literature does not easily or always follow the path of virtue rewarded with marriage but includes non-sentimental comic and tragic tellings; and two, the narratives are primarily told from third-person, not first-person, perspectives.

Samuel Richardson's vindication of female virtue through his emplotment of seduction in Clarissa participates in the same movement to redefine sexual difference that gives rise to the new image of the penitent prostitute as a victim of seduction in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. The prostitute became an object of pity and charity, in part, because women's essential nature had been re-imagined to exclude innate vice. William Dodd, a central figure in the Magdalen Hospital and its chaplain, rationalizes the charity's mandate to reform prostitutes by invoking the new definition of essential femininity: “every man that reflects on the true condition of humanity, must know, that the life of a common prostitute, is as contrary to the nature and condition of the female sex, as darkness to light.” Unsurprisingly, Richardson was a supporter of the Magdalen charity from the beginning and, like its founders, he understood the prostitute as a victim of seduction, abandoned to poverty but essentially innocent. We see this in his enthusiastic defense of T. C. Phillips when she published her courtesan narrative shortly after the appearance of Clarissa in 1748. In a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, he indites Phillips's initial seducer, Grimes, and vindicates Phillips's virtue because he believes her initial fall happened without her consent: “What, think you, has not Mr Grimes to answer for in the ruin of Constantia Philips … if the story she tells be true? What ruins, the consequences of her ruin, may not be laid at his door?

Samuel Richardson's critics, both past and present, agree that Clarissa demonstrates an unprecedented ‘knowledge of the heart.’ After reading Clarissa, Thomas Edwards wrote to Richardson: “you are so absolute a master of the heart”; Samuel Johnson said of the novel that it was “the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart.” But what knowledge of the heart does this first-person epistolary text provide? What do we learn about love from reading fiction? Richardson's contemporary readers approached the novel as a test of the heart where passing or failing depended upon recognizing the exquisite virtue of its title character. Edward Young in a letter to the Duchess of Portland wrote that “I look on it [Clarissa] … as a sort of touchstone for the readers of this virtuous age, who, while they think they are only passing their judgment on another's ingenuity, will make a discovery of their own hearts.” Reading Clarissa became a litmus test for an entire generation, examining the reader's sentiment regarding the nature of Woman and her choice in marriage. Clarissa boldly claims her own “right to a heart,” meaning the freedom to marry according to her feelings and to reject the Harlowes' mercenary plan to wed her to the degenerate and sexually repulsive Solmes. But how does Clarissa know what truth her heart has a right to? Many have seen the novel proposing a proto-feminist vision of female autonomy through its call for women's affective freedom.

The repetition of a story at a particular moment in time – in the case of this book, the story of seduction in the later half of the eighteenth century in Britain – prompts at least two different interpretations of how history relates to narrative. The same story might be repeatedly told in order to popularize and naturalize a new historical idea, foregrounding a relation of similitude and emphasizing the mimetic or didactic function of narrative. Or the repetition of a story could denote difference where the deviations within similarity point to a dynamic relation between material conditions and imaginative narratives; in this case, the fact of a story's repetition would indicate both that changing historical conditions open up new objects of understanding and that narrative helps to constitute and to resolve conflicts posed by those new objects. The Seduction Narrative assumes the second formulation to explain how history and narrative interact in the “later eighteenth-century's preoccupation with seduction,” as one historian names the obsessive retelling of the tale. The plot of seduction – where a virtuous young heroine is seduced into believing her lover's vows – dramatizes women's consent to sex at a historical moment when, for the first time, women have “a right to a heart,” as Clarissa boldly claims. The period in Britain under study (1747–1800) witnesses the emergence of companionate marriage as a dominant cultural ideal and this revolution in the history of love carries with it a new social and cultural imperative for women to know their hearts and make choices based upon those affective truths.