Published in 1763, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville was Frances Brooke’s first and most successful novel. Prior to the publication of her own work, Brooke was well known as the translator of Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby à Milady Henriette Campley (1760).
Engaging with several political and aesthetic issues of the day, Julia Mandeville considers forms of education, prescriptive gender roles and the institution of marriage. The novel is written in the epistolary form and contains seventy-seven letters, written predominantly by the witty widow, Lady Anne Wilmot and by the hero of the novel, Harry Mandeville. Although some critics saw it as a sentimental novel, it responds to and critiques the genre, displaying the influence of Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and Julie (1761) and Richardson’s Clarissa (1748).
This modern critical edition contains an introductory essay on the text, endnotes and textual variants as well as appendices containing contemporary reviews and some of Brooke’s other writing.