Actress, playwright, and novelist, Elizabeth Griffith (1727-1793) won fame in England with the publication in 1757 of the first two volumes of Letters Between Henry and Frances, letters from her own courtship with Richard Griffith whom she secretly married in 1751. Her first novel, The Delicate Distress (1769), focuses on the problems women encounter after marriage—the issue of financial independence for wives, the consequences of interfaith relationships, and the promiscuity of their husbands. Against a backdrop of rural England and Paris of the ancien regime, Griffith reimagines the epistolary novel of sensibility in the tradition of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau from a feminist perspective that centers on strong, intelligent, and virtuous women. Two sisters exchange letters about urgent ethical questions concerning love, marriage, morality, art, the duties of wives and husbands, and passion versus reason, while two men correspond about the same subjects. At the story's center is the deep distress of Emily Woodville, a virtuous young newlywed who suspects her husband of infidelity with a French marchioness from his past. The third volume in the series Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women, The Delicate Distress contributes to our understanding of the development of the novel. As Cynthia Ricciardi and Susan Staves show, Griffith's exploration of the psychology of characters who observe and reflect but engage in no grand public actions anticipates Henry James. The editors' introduction places The Delicate Distress firmly in the tradition of the English novel, provides the most complete biography available on Griffith's life, and brings together the most important eighteenth- and twentieth-century criticism of the novelist's work.

The Delicate Distress (1769) focuses on the problems women encounter after marriage - the issue of financial independence for wives, the consequences of interfaith relationships, and the promiscuity of their husbands. At the story's center is the deep distress of Emily Woodville, a virtuous young newlywed who suspects her husband of infidelity with a French marchioness from his past. Against a backdrop of rural England and Paris of the ancien regime, Elizabeth Griffith takes the epistolary novel of sensibility in the tradition of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and re-imagines it from a feminist perspective that centers on strong, intelligent, and virtuous women. Two sisters exchange letters about urgent ethical questions concerning love, marriage, morality, art, the duties of wives and husbands, and passion versus reason, while two men correspond about the same subjects. The Delicate Distress is one of the earliest novels to explore the psychology of characters who observe and reflect but engage in no grand public actions.

“Enchanting . . . the most surprising, confounding, and oddly insightful couple’s trip in recent literary history.” —Entertainment Weekly The prize-winning, bestselling author of Gingerbread; Boy, Snow, Bird; and What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours returns with a vivid and inventive new novel about a couple forever changed by an unusual train voyage. When Otto and Xavier Shin declare their love, an aunt gifts them a trip on a sleeper train to mark their new commitment—and to get them out of her house. Setting off with their pet mongoose, Otto and Xavier arrive at their sleepy local train station, but quickly deduce that The Lucky Day is no ordinary locomotive. Their trip on this former tea-smuggling train has been curated beyond their wildest imaginations, complete with mysterious and welcoming touches, like ingredients for their favorite breakfast. They seem to be the only people on board, until Otto discovers a secretive woman who issues a surprising message. As further clues and questions pile up, and the trip upends everything they thought they knew, Otto and Xavier begin to see connections to their own pasts, connections that now bind them together. A spellbinding tale from a star author, Peaces is about what it means to be seen by another person—whether it’s your lover or a stranger on a train—and what happens when things you thought were firmly in the past turn out to be right beside you.

Conceding that the latter half of the 18th century holds little of true literary value besides the works of Fanny Burney, Ernest Baker nevertheless finds that the period "teems with interest" the public's demand for fiction and the rapidly increasing production of novels reshaped the book market, and "writers who were poor novelists but persons of strong views or feelings" spawned various subgenres worthy of exploration.

Although much has been written about how the novel relates to the epic, the drama, or autobiography, no one has clearly analyzed the complex connections between prose fiction as it evolved before 1800 and the literature of travel, which by that date had a long and colorful history. Percy Adams skilfully portrays the emergence of the novel in the fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and traces in rich detail the history of travel literature from its beginnings to the time of James Cook, contemporary of Richardson and Fielding. And since the recit de voyage and the novel were then so international, he deals throughout with all the literatures of Western Europe, one of the book's chief themes being the close literary ties among European nations. Equally important in the present study is its demonstration that, just as early travel accounts were often a combination of reporting and fabrication, so prose fiction is not a dichotomy to be divided into the "adult" novel on the one hand and the "childish" romance on the other, but an ambivalence—the marriage of realism and romanticism. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel not only shows the novel to be amorphous and changing, it also proves impossible the task of defining the recit de voyage with its thousand forms and faces. Often the two types of literature are almost indistinguishable; even before Don Quixote, Adams writes, many travel accounts could have been advertised as having "the endless fascination of a wonderfully observed novel." This study by Percy Adams will both modify opinions about the novel and its history and provide an excellent introduction to the travel account, a form of literature too little known to students of belles lettres.