" The Adventures of David Simple (1744), Sarah Fielding's first and most celebrated novel, went through several editions, the second of which was heavily revised by her brother Henry. This edition includes Henry's ""corrections"" in an appendix. In recounting the guileless hero's search for a true friend, the novel depicts the derision with which almost everyone treats his sentimental attitudes to human nature. Acclaimed as an accurate portrait of mid-eighteenth-century London, The Adventures of David Simple sets forth some provocative feminist ideas. Also included is Fielding's much darker sequel, Volume the Last (1753).

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A bestseller when it first appeared in 1744, The Adventures of David Simple has since suffered at the hands of Sarah's more famous brother, Henry, who edited the novel substantially in all subsequent editions. Now Sabor has done a service to academics and general readers by restoring Sarah Fielding's original text. In the opening chapters of this "Moral Romance," David Simple's brother cheats him out of his inheritance; David's fortune is restored only when a guilt-stricken accomplice reveals the crime. After this betrayal, David makes a quixotic resolution "To travel though the whole World rather than not meet with a real Friend." He finds nothing but deceit until he meets with Cynthia, Valentine and Camilla, genteel but impoverished young people whose relations have unfairly cast them off. The novel concludes with a double marriage; the couples will live together in a utopian establishment funded by David's inheritance. Fielding's 1753 sequel, Volume the Last, is considerably darker. David endures a Job-like series of afflictions as, plagued by lawsuits, false friends and illness, he loses his fortune, his house, his children and his beloved wife. On his deathbed, David meditates on "the Horrors of Friendship": attachment to loved ones leads only to pain in a world where "solid and lasting Happiness is not to be attained." Sabor's introduction lays out the family tragedies and financial difficulties that perplexed Fielding's career and provides a detailed revisionist account of her impressive literary accomplishments.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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