BENNETT, Anna Maria.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Beggar-Girl and Her Benefactors. First edition of what may be the longest 18th-century English novel by a woman. It has elements of a roman a clef, based on characters Mrs Bennett come to know during her long liaison with Admiral Sir Thomas Pye, with whom she lived until his death in 1785.The plot revolves around the beggar girl Rose, who is of noble parentage but was exchanged in infancy with the child of her nurse. Rosa's guardian, an old Indian army colonel, is another major figure in the novel, and the mystery of Rosa's birth is finally resolved in India.Mary Russell Mitford found in it "a freshness and truth... which I have never found in any fiction except that of Miss Austen". Coleridge described it as "the best novel me judice since Fielding". As the modern critic Joyce Tompkins puts it: here "Smollett and Richardson are left behind; we are on the threshold of a new era, and Dickens and Thackeray are casting their shadows before" (p. 173).

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