This chapter focuses on the philosophical novels of Sarah Fielding and Sarah Scott, younger sisters to fame and zealous proponents of literary and social reform, though perhaps not in that order. Tracking their novels’ trajectory away from the organizing singular narrator toward collective perspectives allows me to diagram a genealogical chain of formal experimentation that runs through Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and The Governess (1749) through Sarah Scott’s Description of Millenium Hall (1762). This chapter offers a new approach that discerns the patterned formal framework that undergirds how these novels imagine reparative communal responses to gender-based harms and women-centered alternatives to possessive individualism.

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.

Chapter 2 differentiates the debtors’ prison from the criminal prison in print. In the novel, debtors’ prisons are reliably depicted as spaces of protracted sentimental suffering, involving the inmate’s wider family circle. This chapter argues that the novel signals a criticism of these prisons as cultural and legal structures not through sarcasm and generic experimentation, but through the inversion of given or inherited social hierarchies. It demonstrates that the debtors’ prison in the novel almost uniformly stresses and celebrates the relational nature of the debtors’ identity and economic practise, complicating Ian Watt’s classic account of the early novel as a generative instrument of individuation and industrial capitalism. It ends by elaborating the relationship between the writer of fiction in the world and the incarcerated debtor in fiction through an analysis of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress and the debtors’ prisons in Smollett’s novels.

Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) combines the reforming strategies of satire, conduct writing, and fable. The collision of these forms creates a fabular hybrid, a text in which fabular elements are folded into the generic markers of the conduct book, resulting in an intensification of the satire of conduct writing and infusing it with a moral claim. In the preface to her excoriating exposure of the abuses of power in domestic life, Collier applauds Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants for its “ingenuity,” the descriptor she applies to her own manual, and the text bears comparison to the Scriblerian project with its satire of both medium and message. The three sections into which Ingeniously Tormenting is divided emphasize the satire of the conduct book. The concluding fable of the Lion, the Leopard, the Lynx, and the Lamb, however, forces a rereading of Ingeniously Tormenting and points to John Gay’s fables. When references to animals, teeth, and claws to describe human behavior are echoed in the real teeth and claws of the animals in the fable, the essay’s tone darkens. The fable’s placement at the end of the book reflects the ironic inversion characteristic of satire.