The History of Lady Julia Mandeville

by Frances Brooke

This Elibron Classics book is a reprint of a 1920 edition by D. Appleton and Company, New York.

150 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1763

About the author

British novelist, playwright, and translator Frances Moore Brooke sometimes used the pseudonym Mary Singleton, Spinster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances...

Reviews

[Jennifer]

I'm not going to say WHAT happened, but if you don't want to have any ideas about the book going into it, you should stop reading now because of generic spoilers.










I had no preconceptions about this book heading into it. I'd never read any articles about it, never heard references to it in lectures, etc. I knew it was 18th century; I knew it was an epistolary novel (which I'm a sucker for). I knew the author was Frances Brooke, but I didn't even process that Frances was the female form. (I was listening to it on Librivox, so I kept hearing the name, but I didn't know if I was hearing Frances or Francis.)

At the beginning, it seemed a straightforward novel of its type, and I was convinced I knew exactly how it was going to end. Can I just say that the ending surprised me in a bunch of different ways? It's making it hard for me to figure out how many stars to give it for how well it satisfies or exceeds its type because I'm not quite sure what type it is.... And this is one of my favorite kinds of experiences--not knowing where a book will go and then winding up somewhere else. It's one of my favorite reasons for reading old but non-canonical texts--the surprises can be pretty big.