Correspondence with Sarah Wescomb, Frances Grainger and Laetitia Pilkington The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson Series

Samuel Richardson (1689?1761), renowned master printer and celebrated English novelist, wrote hundreds of letters during his lifetime. The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson is the first complete edition of these letters. This volume contains his correspondences, many published for the first time, with three very different young women, all seeking to find their voice within family and society while corresponding with a celebrated author and moralist. Sarah Wescomb and Frances Grainger, two young, unmarried correspondents, sought paternal advice from the middle-aged author and in the process contested stances taken in his novels. Laetitia Pilkington, an accused adulteress, offers poignant glimpses into an impoverished woman's struggles to survive in Grub Street. The scholarly apparatus in this volume provides ample information about these three women's lives and their milieu, giving fascinating insights into eighteenth-century English social and literary history.

General editors' preface; Acknowledgements; Chronology; List of abbreviations; General introduction; Richardson's correspondence with Sarah Wescomb; Richardson's correspondence with Frances Grainger; Richardson's correspondence with Laetitia Pilkington; Appendix: Richardson's list of worthy women; Index.

John Dussinger is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois where he taught for 36 years. He is author of The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1974) and In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen's World (1990), and has written numerous articles and reviews on iconic writers such as Swift, Shaftesbury, Locke, Hume, Middleton, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Johnson and Austen.