Delicate Distress-Pa

" The Delicate Distress (1769) focuses on the problems women encounter after marriage-the issue of financial independence for wives, the consequences of interfaith relationships, and the promiscuity of their husbands. At the story's center is the deep distress of Emily Woodville, a virtuous young newlywed who suspects her husband of infidelity with a French marchioness from his past. Against a backdrop of rural England and Paris of the ancien régime, Elizabeth Griffith takes the epistolary novel of sensibility in the tradition of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and re-imagines it from a feminist perspective that centers on strong, intelligent, and virtuous women. Two sisters exchange letters about urgent ethical questions concerning love, marriage, morality, art, the duties of wives and husbands, and passion versus reason, while two men correspond about the same subjects. This was one of the earliest novels to explore the psychology of characters who observe and reflect but engage in no grand public actions.

About the author

Cynthia Ricciardi is a Ph.D. candidate at Brandeis University.
Susan Staves is professor of English at Brandeis University.

Summary

Actress, playwright, and novelist, Elizabeth Griffith (1727-1793) won fame in England with the publication in 1757 of the first two volumes of Letters Between Henry and Frances, letters from her own courtship with Richard Griffith whom she secretly married in 1751.

Product details

• Authors: Elizabeth Griffith
• Assisted by: Cynthia Booth Ricciardi (Editor), Susan Staves (Editor)
• Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 17.04.1997
• EAN: 9780813109251
• ISBN: 978-0-8131-0925-1
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 17 mm
• Weight: 467 g
• Series: Eighteenth-Century Novels by W; Eighteenth-century Novels by Women
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies