This book brings to light a mythic dimension of seventeen important eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century narratives that revolve around the persecution of one or more important female characters, and offers original readings of novels by Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Radcliffe, Godwin, Austen, Scott, and others. The myth in question, which Raymond Hilliard calls 'the myth of persecution and reparation, ' serves as a major vehicle for the early novel's preoccupation with the 'mother, ' a mythic figure distinct from the historical mother or from the mother as she is represented in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century maternal ideolog

Raymond F. Hilliard is professor of English at the University of Richmond. In addition to serving for twelve years as Chair of the Department, he has taught a variety of courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, as well as courses on the modern and contemporary novel and on narrative theory. He has published articles in SEL, Studies in Philology, PMLA, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Life.