Authors
Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) and Hannah Foster ((1762-1837)
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
These two writers experimented with narrative fiction, which was still a new kind of writing in the English-speaking world and a mode whose moral dimensions were still uncertain and controversial. Both writers tell stories of courtship, love, and misunderstanding – with a lot of letters flying back and forth. Murray’s story ends happily, or at least as happily as a Jane Austen novel; Foster’s follows the pattern of Rawson’s Charlotteand Richardson’s Clarissa – catastrophe, with an unmistakable admonition embedded at the heart.
1. As you look back at these two novels across the divide of two centuries and more, how do they hold up in what you would regard as the fundamentals: plausible and interesting human relationships; a measure of suspense; an evocation of your empathies as a reader? If you find either or both of these works durable because of those qualities or others, where, for you, are the sources of that strength?
2. When you compare these older love stories to newer ones – especially to modern stories that seem to moralize, or that do so forthrightly – what can you say has happened to the assignment of blame: the deep causes of the trouble, the essence of the villainy? If the woes and tribulations of Miss Wellwood and Eliza Wharton aren’t entirely plausible to us now, what flaws and obstacles hold sway in their stead in modern tales of love and desire gone wrong?