which would have been necessary to portray women as
they really are. And the rest was satire and morality.

How heavily moral they were can be illustrated by a
characteristic remark of one of them, Clara Reeve: "The
great and important duty of a writer is to point out the
difference between virtue and vice, to show one as rewarded
and the other as punished."

The tone of all eighteenth-century literature is moralistic
but never so nakedly moralistic as in the hands of the earnest
blue-stockings in the closing decades of the century. They
were usually educationists, charged with the bringing up of
younger brothers and sisters, great readers of Locke, Rousseau
and the more informative memoirs and travel books. And
if their books were starched with moral instruction they had
the compensation of living what appear, at this distance, to
be singularly happy lives. Their sprightliness and good
humour went not so much into their books as into the art
of living. Who, for example, would have suspected that
Mrs. Barbauld once climbed an apple-tree and swung over
the garden wall in order to escape from a too-ardent suitor?
And if their heroines were passive creatures living under the
rule of Prudence it was a word that had a different ring to
the eighteenth-century ear. Even the great Fielding con-
sidered it the quality without which "if a man does not
become a felon to the world, he is at least felo de se." The
new heroine was constantly on her guard against the delusions
of romance and the treachery of her own warm heart. As a
character in Mrs. James Keir History of Miss Greville put it,
he would wish his wife to feel passion but not to express it,
since the turbulence of passion is incompatible with "that
inner delicacy. . . which is inseparable from a truly virtuous
female mind." The once loving husband can run away

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