Henrietta

A pioneer in the tradition of English women's fiction, Charlotte Lennox was valued friend to both Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson and a major influence on Jane Austen. The heroine of Charlotte Lennox's Henrietta is a young Englishwoman who resists her aunt's pressure to convert to Catholicism and is set adrift in London society. But unlike many of her passive, vulnerable contemporaries in fiction, the admirable Henrietta makes her way in the world relying on her own cleverness, conviction, and wit. This groundbreaking work of satire and human folly is republished here in a fully annotated modern edition.

Charlotte Lennox (1730–1804) was an English novelist, poet, and playwright. Ruth Perry, professor of literature at MIT, has written widely on women in eighteenth-century England. Her most recent book is Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818. Susan Carlile, associate professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, has published articles in numerous journals and is writing a critical biography of Charlotte Lennox.