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.

Eighteenth-century British culture witnessed the ascendance of the ideology of proper human form, a belief system interlinking concepts of the beautiful, the natural, and the good with proper bodily configuration. The relatively new discourses of physics, biology, and aesthetics, and the re-emergence of the ancient pseudo-science of physiognomy, contributed to the formation of this ideology. Many of the period’s literary texts endorsed and/or critiqued social expectations of the beautiful and the natural, as these established the popular assumption that a well-shaped and good-looking body instantiated the proper human form. This assumption in turn associated proper form with high moral standards, the possession of which determined an individual’s social respectability and acceptance. Such physiognomic thinking also equated deformity with depravity. However, authors such as Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Sarah Scott, each in their own way, exposed the complexities and contradictions inherent in such reasoning. Moreover, the novel – emerging as a genre during this century – assumed an important role by becoming a vehicle by which the culture of sensibility softened and appropriated certain aspects of the ideology of form by recasting defective and deformed characters as objects of pity and charity.