| When Samuel Richardson published Pamela in 1740, he changed the face of the novel, bringing forward a servant girl as his heroine and offering pens to generations of women novelists. Women, especially, found in Pamela a true heroine, one who was morally uncorrupt, yet concerned with typically feminine problems--how to move safely and happily from the protection of parents to that of a husband. Imitating Pamela, women claimed as their own a subgenre of the novel that may be termed the courtesy novel.;The purpose of the courtesy novel is not merely moral instruction, however. Just as a courtesy book, sui generis, defines a social role, so a courtesy novel serves the same purpose. Novels by Sarah Robinson Scott, Charlotte Lennox, Fanny Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Susan Ferrier, and others define what it means to be an upper-middle class woman in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The courtesy novel was written by women for women; it was a means of identifying women's issues and solving women's problems.;Women novelists were usually circumspect when they raised what might be controversial issues, but it is a measure of their cohesiveness and their cleverness that two questions were relentlessly purused through their novels: how women were to be educated and how they were to be married. In response to conservative courtesy literature (and presumably to society), female novelists took a liberal stance toward women's right to good education and to marriage for love.;The courtesy novel was a means of instructing other women, for providing the book of customs a-la-mode that Fanny Burney's Evelina wished for. By longevity alone, the courtesy novel was an important factor in the history of the novel between Richardson and Austen; moreover, it was at once a record of, and a pedagogical tool for, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women.;Typically, a courtesy novel is centered around a young lady's entrance into society, the problems arising from that situation, and her fortunate settlement in marriage. By her encounters with the obstacles the world presents to her, the heroine affords the novelist an opportunity to give lessons in meeting stranger with dignity, in listening to the addresses of suitors, in recognizing the honet homme, and in refraining from committing oneself until the preferred suitor has declared his intentions. |
