Anti-Pamela and Shamela

Eliza Haywood · Henry Fielding

Jan 2004 · Broadview Press

About this ebook

Published together for the first time, Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela and Henry Fielding’s An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews are the two most important responses to Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Anti-Pamela comments on Richardson’s representations of work, virtue, and gender, while also questioning the generic expectations of the novel that Pamela establishes, and it provides a vivid portrayal of the material realities of life for a woman in eighteenth-century London. Fielding’s Shamela punctures both the figure Richardson established for himself as an author and Pamela’s preoccupation with virtue.

This Broadview edition also includes a rich selection of historical materials, including writings from the period on sexuality, women’s work, Pamela and the print trade, and education and conduct.

About the author

Catherine Ingrassia is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. She is the author of Authorship, Commerce and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge University Press, 1998).