The prose fiction of Penelope Aubin, including the two texts included in this edition—The Life of Madam de Beaumount (1721) and The Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1723), offers a delightful and provocative challenge to many of our standard ways of thinking about both the “rise of the novel” in eighteenth-century Britain and about women writers in that era. Aubin’s fast-paced highlights the persistence and vitality of romance as a form of storytelling, and the centrality of teenaged girls to tales that extend far beyond the domestic and amatory modes with which women writers have traditionally been associated. Aubin’s resourceful heroines and the often spectacular violence they engage in in order to defend their lives and bodily integrity against threats allow us a more expansive and exciting view of early eighteenth-century fiction than the current classroom canon often permits. In narratives spanning the globe and featuring pirates, North African corsairs, Jacobites, shipwrecks, and seraglios, Aubin delivers a form of fiction with roots that go back to antiquity and commitments that often feel far more modern than most other texts from the eighteenth century.

During the 18th century, not all books were found in bookstores or libraries. In London, itenerate book salesmen wandered the streets hawking their wares. The books they sold were cheap and often poorly printed, but they represented the beginnings of popular reading among the growing lower classes. Henry and Ann Lemoine were among the most prolific writers and publishers of street literature in the late eighteenth-century and theirs is a story of poverty, greed, prison, and female empowerment.

This study breaks new ground surveying the origins of the Gothic chapbook, its publishers and authors, in order to establish conclusively the impact these pamphlets had on the development of the Gothic genre. Considered the illegitimate offspring of the Gothic novel, the lowly chapbook flooded the market in the late eighteenth century, creating a separate and distinct secondary market for tales of terror. The trade was driven by a handful of individuals who were booksellers and dealers, circulating library proprietors, stationers, and small publishers – what they produced were more than four hundred chapbooks, bluebooks and shilling shockers containing Gothic tales from magazines, redactions of popular novels, extractions of entire inset tales, and original tales of terror. This book responds to the urgent and pressing need to contextualise the Gothic chapbook in ascertaining a more concise and comprehensive view of the entire Gothic genre.