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The novel
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sentence of death. He faces it most unheroically, but emerges as a
champion of hypocrisy and double-dealing – a devil-figure for the times.
Fielding took the novel forward from the epistolary form to what
he called ‘comic epics in prose’, rich in character and action, revelling
in the English landscape and in the manners of the people his hero
encounters. He thus created, at the same time as Richardson was
writing, a new area of novelistic experience, one which would lead
on to the major comic novelists of the early Victorian age. The spirit
he portrays comes to be seen as the spirit of the times, almost a
traditional evocation of the mid-eighteenth century, untouched by the
effects of the Industrial or Agrarian Revolutions.
Critics have argued that Richardson is more forward-looking and Fielding
more backward-looking, but any such judgement is open to debate. The
novel was developing along several different but complementary lines.
Richardson, in many ways, provides models for the psychological novelists
who follow him, Fielding for the social and comic writers.
Female writers of the time have been largely ignored in the history of
the novel – the accepted canon consisting of Defoe, Richardson, and
Fielding – but numerically there were possibly more female than male
novelists. There were certainly more female than male readers in the
new market for fiction.
To find a woman writer creating a heroine who is comparable to a
Fielding hero, we have to turn to Eliza Haywood and Betsy Thoughtless
(1751). Eliza Haywood ran the periodical The Female Spectator, one
of the first magazines intended specifically for a female readership.
She and Henry Fielding’s sister Sarah, above all, deserve to reclaim a
place in the history of the novel, both for the quality of their works
and for the opinions and attitudes they display.
As with Sarah Fielding’s eponymous hero David Simple, the name
of the heroine Betsy Thoughtless gives the clue to the character, but
the thoughtless heroine undergoes a transformation. While dithering,
trying to choose between two possible suitors, Sober and Gaylord,
she loses her ‘true love’, Mr Truelove, who gives up waiting. Thus, she
ends up in an unhappy marriage, and the author has to resort to killing
off both the husband and Mrs Truelove in order to bring about the
happy ending. The sufferings of Haywood’s heroine are presented in a