Exploring how early novels experimented with stories-within-stories, Katie Charles shows how such interpolated tales confronted readers with an array of interpretive challenges. Considering the habitual nature of these interruptions by seemingly throwaway extra plots, she investigates why they persistently unnerve readers with the sense that they have “lost the plot.” Taking the bold critical step of recognizing interpolated tales as a category worthy of analysis, she raises new and exciting questions around how these tales should be read and by what measure they might be said to “count.” The peculiar literary history reconstructed here offers a key for assessing how various texts and readers think about who gets to speak and be heard, choices of particular import in the context of gender difference and its historical relation to public speech. Lost Plots argues that attending to this forgotten body of evidence opens up a new account of gendered speech and power.

This chapter traces the long history of critical arguments that frame Henry Fielding’s interpolated tales as feminized “freckles” and “blemishes” that mar his otherwise masculine plots. Taking the much-squabbled about “History of Leonora” from Joseph Andrews (1742) as a case study, I examine the interpretive dilemmas posed by a tale that purports not only to speak across the gender binary but across an ossified, almost caricatured gender binary. My close reading of “The History of Leonora” contends with its intertextuality, likely joint authorship with Sarah Fielding, and structuring around negative space. Based on this body of evidence, I argue that a singularly nuanced female subjectivity emerges from the clash of tale-narrator, heroine, and spiteful town gossips, all of them women whose talking about women enables a critique of the social possibilities open to them – one that shimmies free space for alternatives to reflexively binary thinking.

In the eighteenth century, the practice of law was not a self-governing profession in the modern sense. Many lawyers and judges lacked specialized knowledge and formal training, and only a few were subject to regulation or oversight. This chapter examines how Henry Fielding grapples with the consequences of this undisciplined, undereducated, and ethically unmoored legal culture in Tom Jones (1749). Fielding derides the inadequacies of the period’s legal order by featuring magistrates and attorneys whose primary characteristics are intellectual incompetence, poor judgment, and moral corruption. Yet he also proposes a remedy to the law’s limitations. Drawing from moral philosophies circulating in the mid eighteenth century, Fielding implicitly advocates for a professional system that fosters its representatives’ innate moral virtues and enforces a stable but flexible code of ethics. His proposal has relevance for today’s legal profession, which is likewise susceptible to charges of ineffectiveness, injustice, and unfairness.