The Mary Carleton Narratives, 1663-1673: A Missing Chapter in the History of the English Novel

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, 1914 - Autobiography - 106 pages
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 86 - It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart; in which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.
Page 96 - As conceived in Spain and matured in France, the picaresque novel is the comic biography (or more often the autobiography) of an anti-hero who makes his way in the world through the service of masters, satirizing their personal faults, as well as their trades and professions.
Page 89 - The following tract does not indeed make a jest of his story as they do, or present his history, which indeed is a tragedy of itself, in a style of mockery and ridicule, but in a method agreeable to the fact. They that had rather have a falsehood to laugh at than a true account of things to inform them, had best buy the fiction, and leave the history to those who know how to distinguish good from eviL...
Page 11 - The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled. Being a Full Account of the Birth, Life, Most Remarkable Actions, and Untimely Death of that Famous Cheat Mary Carleton, Known by the Name of the German Princess (1673).
Page 12 - An Historical Narrative of the German Princess " and " The Case of Madam Mary Carleton," which she, aided by one or two professional writers, composed.
Page 45 - If I should promise to give you a true account of her whole life, I should deceive you; for how can truth be discovered of her who was wholly composed of falsehood ? But that I might not err from the truth in what I shall relate to you, I have took some pains to gain intelligence. Some I had from herself, some from those who were considerably concerned with her, and some from Mr. John Carleton, her unfortunate husband; and what I could not gather from these informations, I have supplied by books...
Page 29 - Good, my lord, observe this doting fellow's words, and mark his mistake, for he doth not know me here with his four eyes; how then is it possible that he should now know me with his two!
Page 80 - I say, will write you a battle in any part of Europe at an hour's warning, and yet never set foot out of a tavern ; describe you towns, fortifications, leaders, the strength of the enemy, what confederates, every day's inarch.
Page 4 - ... the heroic romance died and left no issue. And the influence that the century exercised- on the growth of prose fiction, the foundations it laid for the coming novel, are to be sought, not in the writers of romance, but in the followers of other branches of literature, often remote enough from fiction, in satirists and allegorists, newspaper scribes and biographers, writers of travel and adventure, and fashionable comic playwrights.
Page 77 - Thus have I brought this unlucky woman from her birth to her burial. As she was born obscurely and lived viciously, so she died ignominiously. Such crimes as she was guilty of deserve such end and punishment as was inflicted on her, and without repentance and amendment, infallibly find them here and worse hereafter. The only way, therefore, for Christians to avoid the one and contemn the other is with sanctified hearts and unpolluted hands still to pray to God for his grace, continually to affect...

Bibliographic information