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.

This chapter demonstrates how William Earle’s abolitionist novel Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) uses interpolated tales, along with other embedded forms, to vocalize multiple perspectives across cultural and racial difference, while acknowledging the vexed ethics of using a print text to speak for populations largely excluded from literacy and the literary marketplace. Interrupting the otherwise epistolary narrative, “Makro and Amri: An African Tale” allows an enslaved mother to transmit her native Feloop culture to her Jamaica-born son, inspiring him to lead the rebellion for which they both die fighting. Thus allying herself with violence and animating the plot, Amri emerges as one of the most powerful female speakers in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century fiction. Under this approach, the colonial hierarchy of speaker and spoken for emerges as another lopsided power relation available to be acknowledged, denaturalized, and perhaps undermined once we observe and name the ironic breach between novel and tale.

This chapter focuses on the problems of authorship that hover around The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, an autobiographical text embedded in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and how these debates have served as a proxy for critics’ different accounts of the relation between gender and form. I demonstrate how the notorious aristocrat Lady Vane uses her scandalous memoir to voice her real marital complaints within Smollett’s novel, which despite a predominating misogyny, endorses her bid to rewrite her fallen public character as a literary one. As seen in chapter one, the idea that a woman’s speech could play a determinative role in conferring social legitimacy is treated as a conjectural privilege exercisable only in fiction. The resistant reading I offer here highlights the undeniable limitations of how Smollett and his text think about gender, while finding room for modern readers to re-engage meaningfully with both texts, novel and tale. Discovery of the first standalone publication of Memoirs, as a sumptuous art book with erotic illustrations by Véra Willoughby in 1925, demonstrates the radical feminist and queer potentiality of the text and its embedded form.

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 this reading of Frances Sheridan’s sentimental novel, The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), centering a short embedded tale, previously dismissed as “padding,” flips the script such that didacticism serves as an object of critique instead of its vehicle. As a captivity narrative about debt and consent, “The History of Miss Price” tells of how its plucky tale heroine escapes a sexually predatory creditor, eventually achieving her comic ending with the help of Sidney Bidulph, the otherwise passive novel heroine. In a plot line more famously recirculated by Susanna Rowson in Charlotte Temple (1794) and Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), Sheridan provides a public forum for legitimating gendered harms previously silenced as too private to be shareable. As a successful speech act, the tale rebukes the novel heroine’s supposedly exemplary model of female passivity and quiescence, and its form, message, and critique are reiterated in the sequel, Conclusion of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1767).