so-so(1741) In 1740 Samuel Richardson wrote Pamela, an epistolary novel about a servant girl who resists her employer's increasingly forceful sexual advances until he proposes marriage, at which point they happily wed. In this 1741 novella, Henry Fielding lampooned Pamela by pretending to publish Pamela's original letters, which expose her as a fraud. Fielding's wit is sharper than Richardson's, but his classism and misogyny are, if anything, worse.
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