Far from Simple: Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters and the Limits of the Eighteenth-Century Sequel

Sarah Fielding is clearly one of the most important novelists of the eighteenth century. Not only is she widely acknowledged now as a crucial precursor for the novel of sentiment, she is also appreciated as a classical scholar, a widely read novelist, a bold moralist, and even as the first muggle to write a novel aimed at children. This appreciation could not always be taken for granted until recent years, however, since Sarah Fielding has traditionally been one of the most patronized and underestimated authors in the eighteenth century. She has often been seen as a woman writer helplessly suspended between the powerful magnetic pulls of the North and South Poles of the novel canon: her brother Henry Fielding, and her close friend Samuel Richardson. Linda Bree, amazingly the first person to publish a book-length study of Sarah Fielding, writes that “when critics of the canon noticed Sarah Fielding’s work at all, it was either to learn more about Henry . . . or to dissect the style and content of Sarah’s fictions as an inevitably unsatisfactory patchwork of qualities directly derived from her brother and her friend”.

Even among those who now take Fielding seriously, including many feminist critics who find her work central to the evolution of the eighteenth-century novel and the development of a culture of feminine sensibility, there is still one aspect of Fielding’s art that is usually (at best) dismissed with a passing reference or (at worst) apologized for as a strategic and artistic misfire. In the impressive family tree of Fielding’s brave and diverse bibliography, there is one disinherited child, a pretender who claims kin to the family patriarch: Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters of David Simple, and Some Others. To which is added, A Vision (1747). Like Fielding herself, Familiar Letters is targeted for otherwise avoidable criticism just because of a name — Sarah’s status as a novelist in relationship to Henry is a rough parallel to Familiar Letters’ status as a novel in relationship to David Simple. On its own terms, Familiar Letters is an innovative and highly experimental moral satire that views an expansive cross-section of domestic and romantic situations; something like a feminist Canterbury Tales for the mid-eighteenth century. But by adding the words “David Simple” to the title and changing a handful of names of the epistolary correspondents to those of her best-seller from three years before, Familiar Letters becomes a sequel. Then all the rules change.

Editions of Fielding’s best-known novel, The Adventures of David Simple, now routinely include Volume the Last, the second sequel she wrote nine years later in 1753. Editors inevitably find themselves in the position of justifying their exclusion of the long, digressive Familiar Letters. Peter Sabor, editor of the most recent and authoritative Kentucky edition, writes that “because the work is only loosely connected to the Adventures of David Simple, it is not reprinted here.” Malcolm Kelsall, editor of the Oxford edition, makes Familiar Letters the plain-featured bastard child who cannot live up to the high standards of its handsome younger sibling: Familiar Letters is a “collection of miscellaneous essays and short tales in letter form, having very little to do with The Adventures,” whereas Volume the Last is a “true sequel,” and is “Miss Fielding’s best work, tight in structure, ironic in conception, pathetic, sentimental, and grimly satirical. It is therefore included in this edition.” Even Bree, loving caretaker of all of Fielding’s literary children, hardly recognizes the mutant Familiar Letters as a member of the species. Despite all of the renewed interest in Sarah Fielding, even dedicated scholars of the eighteenth-century novel remain unfamiliar with Familiar Letters, since no one has bothered to reprint it since its first appearance in 1747.

My intention here is not to argue for the subjective literary quality of Familiar Letters, but instead to reconsider it seriously as a sequel. This leap of faith requires several assumptions, all of which I am making here, and most of which are unusual for Fielding’s critics. First, I am assuming that Fielding knew exactly what she was doing with Familiar Letters and was not aimlessly groping around for material. Second, I am assuming that Familiar Letters is firmly connected to both David Simple and Volume the Last and that our readings of both are incomplete (although not fatally so) without Familiar Letters. Finally, by seeing Familiar Letters in the wider framework of the eighteenth-century novel and not just in the restrictive context of it being a marginal addition to David Simple, I am going to assume that the eccentric nature of Familiar Letters is a mark of its innovative genius, not its failure. It is either a brilliant or incompetent novel, and if we decide in advance that we are going to presume it brilliant until proven incompetent, then suddenly the entire genre of the sequel begins to look more flexible, creative, and considerably more interesting.

Since Familiar Letters is usually ignored in favor of considering David Simple and Volume the Last as the inevitable and exclusive pair, it may be useful to restore a sense of chronology to establish what Sarah Fielding was doing and why. Fielding’s writing career began sensibly enough with brief, anonymous contributions under the intimidating yet supportive eye of her brother Henry. In 1742, Sarah probably contributed the letter from Leonora to Horatio in Joseph Andrews, an exercise in the language of conventional romance. But in her second likely contribution, written in 1743 for Henry Fielding’s A Journey from this World to the Next, she is already asserting her penchant for imaginative risk-taking. Fielding borrows a character from history, Anna Boleyn, and gives her a forceful narrative on her soon-to-be familiar theme of women’s hypocrisy and the dangers of passionate female ambition. It strikes a sharply different tone and diction from the rest of Journey.

From these short exercises, she launches directly into her first full-length novel, David Simple, published in 1744. Reading David Simple in 1744 must have been a profoundly different experience than reading it today. It is easy for us and our students to roll our eyes, perhaps, at the exceptional naiveté of the hero and the many extended scenes of extreme pathos (and at times, certainly, bathos), but we have the hindsight of the sentimental novel which did not thrive until well into the 1770s. In 1744, no one had heard of such a thing, and the “cult” of sentimentality would not exist until its earliest manifestations with the popularity of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and later works beginning in 1759. David Simple also precedes the emotional powerhouse of Richardson’s Clarissa by three full years. Fielding did not wade gingerly into these untested waters; she immersed herself thoroughly, bathing her characters and readers with torrents of tears stemming from the full range of human emotions: pity, remorse, suffering, grief, disappointment, joy, and — most frequently — gratitude. If readers then and now see Sarah Fielding’s work primarily within the context of Henry Fielding’s and Richardson’s novels (even though David Simple was published anonymously), then readers must have not quite known what to make of David Simple, especially since it came out so soon after the steelier Pamela and broadly comic Joseph Andrews. In an era that loved novelty of almost any kind, however, it sold very quickly, as a second edition was called for only ten weeks later.

Fielding added an unfortunate sentence in the “Advertisement to the Reader” prefacing David Simple that seems to have prejudiced her critics for her time to the present: “Perhaps the best Excuse that can be made for a Woman’s venturing to write at all, is that which really produced this Book; Distress in her Circumstances: which she could not so well remove by any other Means in her Power.” There is a strange prejudice among some readers that a work written for money must be somehow less artistically ambitious than one written exclusively from the fickle dictates of the Muse. (Predictably, this prejudice still does not seem to apply as strictly to her brother, or to her admirer Samuel Johnson.) Because it is a fact that Sarah Fielding lived in “reduced circumstances” for most of her life, and because it is a fact that David Simple was popular (although it did not make her much money since she sold the rights to her publisher for a sum probably less than 83.55 pounds), it does not necessarily follow that the only motivation for her to attempt a sequel was to make a quick profit.

Fielding began work on Familiar Letters shortly after the publication of David Simple, perhaps influenced by Richardson who quickly moved to pen a sequel to Pamela. But she did not strike when the iron was hot. The composition of Familiar Letters took place over a leisurely four years, from 1744 to 1747, and the miscellaneous content of the text — composed of many epistolary exchanges that stand alone as independent narrative units — does not suggest anything like the consistent plotting that one would expect for a sequel conceived for maximum commercial appeal and efficient turnaround. If Fielding was indeed trying to capitalize on David Simple, she could have hardly done a worse job of it. The familiar characters are barely there, the tone is different, and the structure is radically altered (for starters). But one thing that readers of Familiar Letters should have recalled (and still should recall) about David Simple, however, is the vision and ambition of the author. Is it likely that the most original author since Richardson, and the novelist who wrote with the exclusive editorial assistance of Henry Fielding, would have suddenly become lazy and forgetful of the basic premises of narratology? Henry, who would know about such things, cautions readers in his preface to Familiar Letters not to expect “another Kind of Entertainment than he will meet with in the following Papers, nor impute the Author’s Deviation from the common Road, to any Mistake or Error.”

Again, with Familiar Letters, the way Fielding published it often overshadows exactly what it was she published. Fielding was one of the first women to publish by subscription, a system whereby the author collects names of subscribers, gets them to pay half the purchase price in advance to fund the production costs of the book, and then pay the second half on delivery of the final product. This could be a very profitable way of publishing, as her brother Henry learned with his Miscellanies (to which Sarah contributed). Fielding, strapped for cash most of her adult life, calculated the profits of Familiar Letters to be £359 before publishing expenses. But the money generated by the subscription list should be less important to us than what it implies about Fielding’s conception of the author/reader relationship in this novel and how it may have influenced her narrative structure. Although evidence will have to remain speculative at best, the diverse and heterogeneous nature of the collected letters allows Fielding to tailor specific exchanges to the interests and tastes of her wealthy readers, since she knew each of them by name. This one-to-one nature of the subscription system, resembling in some ways the patronage system that dominated literary production prior to the eighteenth century, may have been particularly significant for Fielding as both a woman writer and as the author of a sequel.

Betty A. Schellenberg points out that while only a handful of male novelists in the eighteenth century wrote sequels, and even then often did so in conventional ways, virtually all of the most prominent female writers of the era used the sequel, and did so with great creativity. Schellenberg claims that there were competing pressures on women novelists that male novelists did not feel: the domestic expectations of women were at odds with their literary success, so “the disjunctions between anti-market and market values are particularly visible in the contrast between the rhetoric of these women and their actual practice and cultural position.” In sequels women could perform a “strategic career function” by exploiting their known successes and reaching for an expanded audience,

But, at the same time, in portraying itself as written to please an already established readership, the sequel preserved the pretence of the modest woman’s writing only for her intimate circle, while allowing the author a bold claim to moral and narrative authority as the established instructor of those readers. Thus the form offered women writers, in particular, an effective means of enhancing their professional status.

Whereas male novelists wrote sequels largely to establish literary paternity rights, these models for constructing a professional identity “carried the risk, in fact, of marking such activity as transgressive. As a result, the woman writer’s approach to the sequel is remarkably free from claims of proprietorship and of parentage, hence of the right to social or economic profit from her productions.” Schellenberg therefore finds that the anonymity of both the first novel’s author and readers is replaced in a woman’s sequel with “the model of familiar acquaintances reunited to enjoy the mutual pleasures of conversation served as a means of associating her activity with a private, non-economic sphere.”

Aspects of Schellenberg’s argument seem to apply differently to Fielding’s two sequels. While all three installments of David Simple were published anonymously, the prefaces to all three make it clear the author is female (as if the dominant themes and inescapable sensibility do not give it away). The “Advertisement to the Reader” of David Simple begins bluntly: “The following Moral Romance (or whatever Title the Reader shall please to give it) is the Work of a Woman, and her first Essay; which, to the good-natured and candid Reader will, it is hoped, be a sufficient Apology for the many Inaccuracies he will find in the Style, and other Faults of the Composition.” Bree writes of this strong opening that

the terms of the declaration can be read as a combination of honest self-assessment and shrewd judgment of a new and growing market for didactic fiction by a modest female moralist. Sarah’s views — on marriage, on the position of women in society, and on the responsibilities of civic humanism — were often provocative, even radical; the stance of female conformism was in this context a useful strategy.

David Simple and Volume the Last have prefaces (by Henry Fielding in the second edition, and Jane Collier, respectively) that assume a wide and literate readership who will both recognize existing literary conventions and indulge new combinations of them. However, the list of subscribers attached to every copy of Familiar Letters, along with its fine leather binding, does create the sense of an elite and privileged inner circle of readers known personally by the author. If Volume the Last seeks to reassert proprietary control over the original story line and set of characters (although as far as I can discover there had been no piracies or spurious continuations of David Simple), then Familiar Letters shares the wealth: guest writers are invited into the text, identified as such, and welcomed as equal contributors (Henry Fielding and James Harris contribute letters and dialogues, and Collier writes the preface).

Diversity continues to be the rule as Fielding moves forward with her career. As we have seen, four years separate David Simple from its first sequel. Even though Familiar Letters was a greater financial success than David Simple, Fielding apparently had no wish to make it (what we would now call) a franchise. Fielding turned her attention to an astonishing variety of other works. She began writing The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (not published until 1757), referred to by its modern editor as “perhaps the most imaginative work of classical scholarship produced during the Augustan age.” She plans a “Book Upon Education” in 1748 (never published). 1749 sees a novel written for children, The Governess: or, Little Female Academy, as well as an extended work of literary criticism, Remarks on Clarissa, Addressed to the Author. Only then, after an additional four years elapse, does she publish Volume the Last in 1753. Nine years have now gone by since the publication of David Simple, which, quite in contrast to readers today who find both works inevitably bound together in one small paperback, must have seemed like a distant memory to its original readers.

My point with this brief chronology is to emphasize the impression that Fielding was not writing sequels primarily to capitalize on earlier success. The evidence strongly suggests a restless, creative imagination that was rarely content to write the same kind of material twice: between David Simple and Volume the Last, we have an epistolary collection of moral reflections (Familiar Letters), a work of historical fiction, a tale for children, and serious literary criticism. The trend continues after Volume the Last: there is an incomplete play, the wildly experimental and uncategorizable collaboration with Collier titled The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable, two conventional romance novels (The Countess of Dellwyn and The History of Ophelia), a scholarly translation from Greek (Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates), and a few scraps of poetry. In this light, Familiar Letters seems less like an awkward attempt at an ill-conceived sequel, as most readers seem to presume, and more like one exercise in a planned series of artistic stretches from an ambitious author who knew precisely what she was doing.

The second assumption I am making is that a reading of Familiar Letters is important for a complete understanding of the two works written before and after it, David Simple and Volume the Last. There is some legitimate question as to whether or not Fielding herself saw Familiar Letters as essential for reading the two other novels. Her silence about it in Volume the Last is telling. Nowhere does she say anything like “when last we saw our hero…,” and the preface by Jane Collier does not allude to Familiar Letters. To the contrary, she writes of the challenges authors face in sequels when characters appear in contrast to their “first Appearance,” overlooking the fact that Volume the Last will be the second time the reader has renewed their acquaintance. Nevertheless, I believe there is good reason to believe that Fielding wished, or even presumed, that her readers were familiar with Familiar Letters before they picked up Volume the Last. If the references are few and vague, it is not necessarily because she was disowning Familiar Letters, but perhaps because almost seven years had elapsed and she was simply being realistic about what her readers would be able to remember. The direct references to events and minor characters in David Simple, now nine years in the past, are only slightly more numerous and make no great demands upon the reader’s memory. As is the case in most sequels, there is a fine line between welcoming back your previous readers and attracting new ones, and Fielding (as does a majority of other authors and filmmakers) leans toward the latter.

The very thing that makes Volume the Last of interest to literary critics is oddly the same thing that brings most of them to dismiss Familiar Letters. The stark difference between the domestic comedy of David Simple and the sentimental tragedy of Volume the Last makes reading the paired novels a fascinating exercise in genre study and an invitation to speculate on what the shift signifies about women, representation, satire, the evolution of the novel, etc. But if David Simple is our baseline of comparison, Familiar Letters is just as starkly different, although in other ways. Certainly the simple binary opposition of comedy/tragedy is easier to canonize than the more awkward opposition of comedy/epistolary moral essays/tragedy. Familiar Letters refers to specific situations in David Simple roughly the same number of times (and there are not many) as Volume the Last does. What it comes down to is that if a few minor plot elements were altered and the names of the four principal characters in Volume the Last were changed to something else besides David, Valentine, Camilla and Cynthia, it would never occur to anyone that Volume the Last (under a new title, of course) had anything whatsoever to do with David Simple. This is the same charge made against Familiar Letters: it bears no real relationship to David Simple other than some character names.

Fielding’s technique of naming is extremely fluid across the three novels in any case. In David Simple, we see several humouristic names (Spatter, Varnish, Simple, Valentine, Trusty, etc.), perhaps reflecting the influence of the stage as brought to her through her brother’s novels. As in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, these quasi-allegorical names exist side-by-side with a minority of more realistic names. In Familiar Letters, the names are almost all quaintly (sometimes bizarrely) Latinate or Grecian with overtones of the pastoral (Cleomenes, Lysimachus, Pharamond, Chromulus, Bilbus, etc.), existing side-by-side with a minority of humouristic names (Lord Foppington, Filander, Hautilla). There are even two entirely different, unconnected characters both with the unusual name Lindamira. In Volume the Last, the range of characters is dramatically narrowed from both its predecessors, but with the possible exception of the oily name “Orgueil” imported from David Simple, Fielding makes them exclusively realistic (Dunster, Parker, Drayton, Nichols, etc.). It is therefore difficult to build a convincing argument for Fielding’s consistency — or inconsistency — of sequels based on the names of characters alone.

What Volume the Last does share with David Simple in terms of the more important thematic unities, however, is also shared with Familiar Letters: a deep concern for the powerlessness of women in a patriarchal world, the hypocrisies of those who speak of virtue but do not exercise it, the evils of female vanity and jealousy, the nature of true friendship, the redeeming power of sentiment, and the pleasures of a genuinely selfless community of equals. Familiar Letters is therefore no more, and no less, an authentic sequel to David Simple than Volume the Last.

Often the impression is created that Volume the Last must be the only legitimate sequel because critics who influence such things omit Familiar Letters from consideration. Depending upon a critic’s thesis, of course, this omission can sometimes bring about a misleading or incomplete assessment of Fielding’s achievement. For example, Schellenberg’s The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740–1775 argues that Fielding is one of several novelists who revise the format of the phallocentric comic romance plot and instead find a more feminist resolution where the protagonists feel safe within a circle of conversational friends. Schellenberg locates in David Simple a

sort of blueprint for the transformation of an archetypally linear and individualistic plot into a fictional model on the conversational circle. The self-serving hero is exposed, while the passive and collaborative protagonist becomes the ideal; the impulse to journey towards a goal of fulfilled desire is proven a chimera and replaced by the stasis of the conversational group; hierarchical and authoritarian conflict is followed by egalitarian consensus on the model of an intimate family network of brother and sister, husband and wife; abuses of language are portrayed in detail before giving way to transparent conversation. . . . Nevertheless . . . visible just beneath the optimism of this narrative structure and its final summation are the stress fractures created by the necessity of excluding conflict, of acknowledging the ultimate individuality of consciousness, and of reintegrating the egalitarian circle within existing social structures.

In such a schemata, Volume the Last forms the logical and terminal counterpoint to David Simple in a series of neatly drawn dichotomies:

Volume the Last reverses the amnesiac tendency of the original’s teleological structure by placing a corrupt and unregenerate larger society in direct conflict with the little society of David Simple. In particular, the use of the Orgueil family as a continual point of contrast to, and source of attacks upon, David’s family effectively transforms the optimistic progression from the sentimental picaresque journey to the conversational circle into a schematized tableau of social reality as a predetermined and recurrent triumph of selfishness over sympathy.

All of this works very well so long as we ignore the presence of Familiar Letters (which makes no appearance in Schellenberg’s book).

Once the decision is made in advance to legitimize Familiar Letters as a sequel, the binary oppositions begin to fall apart and Fielding’s cumulative project begins to look much more complicated. For Schellenberg’s own project of articulating Fielding’s philosophy of friendship as a feminist alternative to the marriage-centered plot of the invested patriarchy, Familiar Letters shows how Fielding does not always draw in perfect circles. Friendships across the range of Familiar Letters sometimes fall into groups of two and threes, in and out of marriages and courtships, not always in the perfect pairs of parallel married couples. Women’s friendships sometimes collapse from (and sometimes survive despite) social scandals or feminine jealousy, not always from threats imported from outside the circle. Some of the anecdotes have conventional comic resolutions ending in marriage, some do not, and some begin long after the marriages have taken place. Across Familiar Letters as a whole, there is a deep insight into female group psychology in an impressive array of manifestations. In David Simple we have conversation but no circle of friends (until the happy conclusion), in Volume the Last we have a circle of friends but not so much conversation (it is more plot-driven), but in Familiar Letters we have both conversation and friendship but not the circle. In fact, it is the absence of shared conversation that gives Familiar Letters its miscellaneous feel: a series of letters is shared between correspondent A and B, but once they are concluded, the correspondents rarely reappear later in the novel and no one else reads or refers to the letters. Fielding simply moves on. Schellenberg’s account of the “conversational ideal” therefore seems only partially valid: “Conversation, for example, evolves from the pleasure of intense participation in one another’s responses and of making one another happy in David Simple to an increasingly stoic silence on the part of each member of the group about their mutual sufferings, together with an acceptance of one another’s commitment to the group that makes words unnecessary, in Volume the Last.” In various parts of Familiar Letters there is stoicism without silence, suffering without mutuality, and commitments to groups large and small that require great rhetoric of negotiation. Fielding was not simply going through a sea-change of personal experience that led her to social disillusionment between the years of David Simple and Volume the Last; she was going through a deliberate study of genre and working her way through a series of literary influences to arrive at the century’s most ambitious project in the limits and possibilities of sequels as a vehicle for comprehensive social satire.

Fielding must have been tempted to cut the thread connecting David Simple and Familiar Letters. The fact that she did not, however, should indicate to us that despite the radical differences between the two works, she felt there was something for the reader to gain by seeing the two novels as parts of the same larger social and literary vision. Nevertheless, she makes the direct connections between the two novels few and relatively trivial. It is as if she is going out of her way in an otherwise divergent novel to present Familiar Letters as a sequel to David Simple, nevertheless minimizing those connections in order to maximize her creative freedom.

The specific narrative links between David Simple and Familiar Letters are easily summarized. At the end of David Simple, David has ended his quest for a true friend by falling in love with the oppressed Cynthia, only soon thereafter finding in the attic of his boarding house a brother and sister named Valentine and Camilla who are in even greater need of the charity he tingles with delight to distribute. It turns out that Valentine is the lost lover of Cynthia, and their happy reunion coincides with David and Camilla falling in love. There are a pair of weddings, and Camilla and Valentine’s elderly father moves in with them to share in their joy and prosperity. At the beginning of Familiar Letters, we are told in one short paragraph that Cynthia is in weak health and has gone to Bath with her husband Valentine. Nothing has changed since the closing days of David Simple, and there is no indication of how much time in the lives of the characters has passed: “Whilst I was overjoy’d to find my utmost Wish gratified, in seeing it in my power to give him pleasure, I need not tell you how happily I passed the Morning. I could not think Adam and Eve in Paradise could exceed us in Bliss.” (From there, it is straight to the first interpolated story: the tragic dalliance between the fickle Lindamira and her false lover Strephon.) At the start of Camilla’s reply, this is the sum total of what we are told about how life has passed in the Simple household since we last saw our familiar characters:

My Father is much better than when you left him, and considering his Age, enjoys his Health tolerably well. We spend our time as agreeably as your Absence will permit us; and as your last Letter, by the manner in which you tell me you spend your time, convinces me how surprisingly you are recovered, I may now say I am perfectly happy; and the having it in my power to give you and my dear Brother the pleasure of informing you of that Happiness, is no inconsiderable Addition to the great Blessings I at present enjoy. Since we parted, I have accidentally contracted an Acquaintance with a Lady, with whom I am very much pleased; and as she has told me her Story, I intend to send it you in Letters, thinking it will be more entertaining than any other thing I can write.

From this idyllic setup we naturally expect difficulties to ensue, conflicts to enter, messages to miscarry, etc. But nothing like that happens. In letter 8, David quickly mentions “the many Disappointments I formerly met with in search of Goodness,” the only direct (and still vague) reference to the action in David Simple. For our four protagonists from David Simple, the novel ends more or less as it begins. At the conclusion of Familiar Letters, some unspecified “ill-natured Accidents” have taken Valentine back to London and left Cynthia in Bath. That’s it.

Volume the Last is as thinly connected to Familiar Letters as Familiar Letters is to David Simple. Neither the preface nor the opening pages of Volume the Last make any mention of Familiar Letters or refer to Cynthia’s trip to Bath. All we are told is that since the principal characters began their wedded bliss at the conclusion of David Simple, eleven years have passed (“which Time I shall pass over with as much Brevity as possible”) so as to begin the tragic turn of their fortunes which is the premise for Volume the Last. Fielding reminds her readers of the situation and character relationships in the original novel, something she never does in Familiar Letters (not that it would be especially necessary for an understanding of the novel, unlike here), telling us that the happy family “soon after their Marriage, agreed to leave London, and, together with the old Gentleman, to settle themselves in some pleasant country Village, out of the Reach of that Hurry and Bustle, so very contrary to the Taste of our whole Society.” Before they can leave, however, some financial business concerning a bad mortgage keeps them in London for a year. Camilla gives birth to their first child, and “Peace, Calmness, Concord, and Harmony reigned throughout the House.” It is here that we have the particular setting of Familiar Letters, although Fielding omits a reference to the title even here: “But they had not been settled in this agreeable Tranquility quite a Twelvemonth, before their united Happiness was interrupted by Cynthia’s falling into a State of ill Health; for which, a Physician, in the Neighbourhood, advised her to go directly to the Bath, and drink the Waters for one whole Season.” David receives notice of the lawsuit that will soon bring down all the tragedies on their happy community, so he stays behind in London with Camilla and her father while Valentine goes with Cynthia to Bath. (This alone authorizes Familiar Letters as a canonical sequel, since there is no other reason within the context of Volume the Last to send Valentine and Cynthia to Bath.) Two months later, Valentine and Cynthia return from Bath and meet the Simples in their new home in Heddington. All told, then, Valentine and Cynthia are in Bath for just over two months. The two possible inconsistencies between Familiar Letters and Volume the Last are that there is no mention in Volume the Last of Valentine returning to London because of “ill-natured Accidents” (although this is from a letter written by Henry Fielding, not Sarah); and two months is just barely enough time for a sickly Cynthia to have been to as many assemblies, received so many visitors, written 11 letters accounting for it all, and received 10 epistles in return all carried by horseback between Bath and London.

There is one important possible connection between Familiar Letters and Volume the Last that has been overlooked by critics. It can suggest a solution to a problem in Volume the Last that has annoyed and confused many of its readers. In the final chapter of Volume the Last, after gradually subjecting her characters to a wide menu of setbacks, tragedies, and degradations, Fielding introduces a seemingly contrived deus ex machina device for an optimistic resolution. David and his only surviving child are now penniless and living off the charity of neighbors. Cynthia returns bankrupt from Jamaica to find David on his deathbed. She sets off on the road to Bath since she remembered “the uncommon Treatment she had met with from a Family not far distant from that City; and she was resolved to set before the Master of it David’s Condition and the Situation of her Niece.” Little knowing that she would be too late to bring David back to health, she nevertheless receives from this mysterious Mr. M — — — — “a kind Promise, that she and her Niece Camilla should be taken Care of. She was likewise supplied bountifully for the present with what was necessary for David; and was sent in a Coach to the Bath, where a Post-Chaise was ordered to convey her as fast as possible, with the comfortable News which the Gentleman had put it in her Power to carry to David.” This conveniently remembered benefactor does not appear anywhere else in Volume the Last, so his sudden appearance makes it seem as if Fielding was nowhere near a match for her brother in her ability to construct comic resolutions with meaningful coincidence.

All of this changes, however, if we consider a minor episode buried half-way through volume one of Familiar Letters. Cynthia, during her two-month stay in Bath, goes with Valentine to have dinner at a house “which stands at a small distance from hence,” placing it in line with the “not far distant from that City [Bath]” mentioned in Volume the Last. The family at the estate are unfortunately not named, and there is no mention of anyone with a last name beginning with ‘M.’ The description of the family exactly matches the description given the benefactor in Volume the Last, however: “the Gentleman seemed to enjoy his Fortune, only as it gave him an Opportunity of serving his Acquaintance, and being beneficent to Mankind.” The family does not appear again in Familiar Letters, but they make a powerful impression on Cynthia, making it perfectly plausible that she would think of them many years later: “This Account, and the image of this amiable Family, dwelt so strongly on my Mind, that I waked this Morning, pleasing myself with reflecting on what I saw and heard yesterday; and went to the Pump-Room, in the most chearful Spirits imaginable.” She communicates her impressions to David back in London, and as if to foretell the connection Fielding would make between this character and the resolution of her plot in a sequel six years later, he responds to Cynthia’s letter with Fielding’s only direct reference back to David Simple:

Oh! Cynthia, I am charmed with your Characters of the Gentleman and lady, at whose House you dined the other day. Every new Instance I hear of such People in the World, is the greatest Joy I can conceive, and more than I can express; nothing but Proofs that Benevolence reigns in the human Mind, can make me avoid Misery in conversing with Mankind; and, notwithstanding the many Disappointments I formerly met with in search of Goodness, yet am I fully rewarded in having found it at last; and that too in such a degree, as, if I was to be locked up from hearing of others Misfortunes, would make me happy to my utmost Wish.

If the deus ex machina in Volume the Last makes Fielding seem amateurish, then considering the implications of David’s letter here in Familiar Letters makes her seem brilliantly subtle. It is wholly appropriate that this benefactor — in Fielding’s scheme, all the more perfect for remaining anonymous — reappears just as David is dying. David’s words in Familiar Letters express what he cannot at the end of his life in Volume the Last: he has finally found true goodness. Poverty, the deaths of almost all of his family, and the betrayals of almost all of his friends leave David isolated and defeated; yet six years prior in Familiar Letters he states that this one Gentleman “would make me happy to my utmost wish” even if “I was to be locked up from hearing of others Misfortunes.” Fielding’s famous pessimism in Volume the Last is significantly tempered by the reappearance of Mr. M — — — , but we would only know this if we consider Familiar Letters to be an authorized sequel to David Simple and prequel to Volume the Last. Long after Valentine has been buried, Fielding presents David as the last truly good man in England. As he dies, it is fitting that the safety and upkeep of his only surviving child will be ensured by the one who David once called the “reward” of his long “search of Goodness.” The torch has been passed. Fielding reminds us that goodness and true charity endures, and she does this precisely by locating it in a minor character from the list of 48 new ones introduced throughout Familiar Letters, making him the only one from Familiar Letters whom she recycles, and thrusting him suddenly into a key role in the dénouement of the final novel of the series. This is her way of letting us know that goodness and charity are sometimes found in the “minor” people whom we pass by quickly in life, making their permanent mark not so much on the events of our lives as on the shape of our moral imaginations.

If we can therefore accept Familiar Letters as a legitimate sequel on the basis of plot, then we can turn our attention to the innovations Fielding makes in Familiar Letters in the context of what she writes elsewhere in David Simple and Volume the Last. Bree writes that Familiar Letters “is not a novel in any sense in which the term would have been understood in the 18th century.” Bree believes this because she finds Familiar Letters has “no plot and little continuous characterization.” What it has in place of these is “a wide variety of discourses, including long and short interpolated stories, at least one formal moral epistle, a fairy tale, fables, and original poems.” A mainstream critical view now is that this heteroglossia of a “variety of discourses” is more, not less, typical of the early novel. The absence of consistent plots and characterization may indeed make these early novels frustrating at times for modern audiences, but I am not convinced that Familiar Letters (and novels like them) “would [not] have been understood in the 18th century.” Paul Hunter has written eloquently on this topic. He finds early novels are “additive, digressive, lumpy, and resistant to closure defined in the generally accepted sense,” and he takes issue with those critics, especially those coming to the eighteenth-century novel with standards of formal control based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, who feel such features are faults. “Eighteenth-century novelists themselves prized these loose organizational features of their work,” Hunter writes.

They justify, explain, and point to conceptual choice where later novelists and critics feel the need to apologize or find fault, and if they sometimes seem defensive and uncertain as well as boisterous and arrogant in their celebrations of formal freedom, they are nevertheless unusually clear about how the formal attributes of their work differ from those in the established literary genres they are trying to supplant or transcend.

This is a serviceable description of the motivations behind Fielding’s innovations in Familiar Letters. Anticipating her brother’s opening chapter in Tom Jones, Fielding provides a banquet for the reader with a morsel or two for every literary taste. In this sense it is like an eighteenth-century Canterbury Tales, with the primary characters who have minimal “plot” arising from their own interactions choosing instead to tell elaborate stories of secondary characters. If one chooses to look for it, there is a bracing kind of formal honesty in Familiar Letters, just as there is in Tristram Shandy or Gulliver’s Travels. “[In] effect, eighteenth-century novelists openly flaunt the nature of their medium and take advantage of it, while Austenites, Jamesians, Lawrentians, Joyceans, Faulknerians, and other would-be tailors of the well-made, reclothe their baggy monsters in uniforms that make them seem more shapely than they really are,” writes Hunter.

A heteroglossic structure by necessity depends upon a novelist placing her work in a diverse context of other discourses. Fielding makes occasional direct references to other works in Familiar Letters, but for the most part allusions are implied and general. There are distinguished literary precedents for Familiar Letters. The tone and content of the interpolated tales in Familiar Letters are indebted to the moral essays of Addison, Steele, and Haywood. Furthermore, there are also other sets of novels throughout the eighteenth century that follow a similarly experimental sequencing of genres in their pattern of sequels. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a fictional spiritual autobiography/travel narrative, was followed by The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, an action-oriented adventure novel, and a second sequel Serious Reflections during the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a collection of moral essays and meditations. Thomas Amory’s non-epistolary Life and Opinions of John Buncle is narrated by a character lifted from Amory’s earlier epistolary novel Memoirs Containing the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain. Richardson wrote a hybridized combined sequel to his three major novels titled A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, contained in the Histories of “Pamela,” “Clarissa,” and “Sir Charles Grandison.” The anonymous epistolary novel Letters of Maria, to which is added, An Account of Her Death, focuses on a character who appears briefly in both Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. David A. Brewer cites many more examples of characters who hop in, out or across their home texts in his book The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

The influence of Richardson in particular may help account for the striking insertion of an epistolary moral satire in between a sentimental comedy and a domestic tragedy. During the years in which she was composing Familiar Letters, Fielding was a close friend of Richardson, who had completed both Pamela and its sequel and was working on Clarissa. Critics of Fielding are likely to be disappointed if they look too carefully for a direct influence from Richardson’s to-the-moment technique, however. As Bree writes of Fielding’s epistolary style, The letters presented in her text are rarely offered as documents of circumstantial composition, and there is hardly any occasion in which letter writers express concern about the position they find themselves in at the time of writing. The only suspense carried over from letter to letter occurs when an interpolated story is interrupted, and even here the breaks rarely occur at moments of high tension.

But perhaps it was precisely because Richardson was writing with epistolary realism, and doing it so well, that Fielding decided to go out of her way to do something very different with the letter form. Her emphasis is not on its relationship to the gradual development and intimate revelation of character, as the form of the private letter would at first suggest. Fielding consistently eschews the obvious, the expected, and the easy (or else why would she write Volume the Last as a morbid tragedy, why include “A Vision” as part of Familiar Letters, and why even consider something as off-beat as The Cry?). Her goal with the epistolary form was to fuse it with the moral essay, along the way experimenting with the limits of “digression” in the context of a linear plot implied only by positioning the novel as a sequel. By giving her readers the full range of sentimentality, didacticism, and tragedy in the trio of David Simple novels, Fielding places creative demands on her readership perhaps equal to, but certainly very different from, the demands upon readers made by Richardson’s epistolary novels. Fielding introduces a new philosophy of reception: using her characters as model readers, sentimental anecdotes and vignettes are seen not just as adventures to entertain or moral lessons to instruct, but also as little gifts of pure emotion we give to one another for the sake of the joy and renewal they bring. Sentences like these punctuate the novel: “I know you partake of all the Sensations of your Friends; and therefore heartily wish I could communicate to you more Scenes of Joy, more Stories of Generosity and Good-Nature.” Reader-response then leads to narrative structure, since these unarranged fragments naturally fall into order in the mind of the sensitive reader, forming a kind of sentimental stream-of-consciousness novel twelve years before Tristram Shandy and 24 years before Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling: “[A]s by such Histories I get the Knowledge of Mens different Sensations on every occasion, I had much rather be let into the various Labyrinths of their Minds, than read Volumes stuffed with the Chaos of Matter of Fact, where Characters are undistinguishable, and it seems to be regarded as a thing of greater consequence where Men were born, or where they died, than what they did, or how they acted,” David writes in response to someone’s assorted stories.

Fielding’s self-imposed challenge in Familiar Letters is perhaps a parallel to that of jazz or blues musicians who spend their entire careers spinning endless variations and substitutions on the simplest of recurring chord progressions: for Fielding, it is “How can I take the basic structure of a man looking for true friendship, someone who lives as part of a tidy pair of pairs, someone absolutely pure of heart and free of internal conflict, and milk three novels out of this that manage to touch on as many aspects of society as possible in every representative literary genre of my day?” All of this is then added to a studious avoidance of the one single literary genre that women were most expected to write: the traditional love story. Granted, David Simple does end with a pair of weddings and an inheritance restored, but the steady pursuit of the man for his elusive lover is hardly the primary concern of the novel. Camilla, David’s bride-to-be, is not David’s first choice and does not even appear until the end of the second volume (the romance doesn’t bloom until the final chapters). In Familiar Letters, Fielding writes a sequel that builds upon this thematic freedom she established with the plotting of the original novel, rather than extending a thin love story plot that that had already found its harmonic resolution. “Ultimately, in Familiar Letters as in the rest of Fielding’s fiction, the happiness or misery of young women is determined not by the standards of romantic love, which implicitly require a different code of behavior for men and women, but by moral standards that apply to men and women equally,” writes Bree. There are certainly romance stories contained within the individual epistles of Familiar Letters, but the format of collecting many stories allows Fielding the freedom to create an overall equality of moral standards by demonstrating a wide diversity of unusual situations one at a time (in one example, an eligible young woman with intelligence, charm, and a large fortune actually decides to become a hermit). The sum total of romance short stories serves to undermine the romance novel.

If there is no unified “boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, etc.” plot cementing the events of Familiar Letters together, then what does provide connections between the various letters? Not much. There is a heterogeneity to the novel that readers will find either liberating or irritating. There is one very long digression in David Simple (the story of Corinna in Book 4), Volume the Last has no digressions at all, and Familiar Letters is arguably nothing but digressions (insofar as that is possible). Letters tend to fall into sets of twos or fours, completing self-contained anecdotes. Quite often an anecdote will take only a few paragraphs, and a long letter can contain up to half a dozen of them. The ordering of anecdotes from one set of letters to the next often seems completely random. (Whereas arbitrary breaks between chapters exist in David Simple and to a lesser extent in Volume the Last, they do nevertheless exist; in Richardson’s novels as well, letters sometimes end and begin again for no other reason than they have simply gone on too long. Henry Fielding’s plotting technique, drawing upon his strong influence of chapter division and titling from Don Quixote, was entirely different.) The profits of this structural freedom in Familiar Letters are found in some of Fielding’s most ambitious narrative experiments this side of The Cry. At one point, for example, she begins an exchange between two characters in the form of a dramatic dialogue, complete with stage directions, and then abruptly drops it for standard third-person narration in mid chapter. There is also a complete fable and a fairy tale (several of which Fielding also folds into The Governess). Proverbs and short poetry are scattered throughout. A complete “novel” is inserted halfway through the second volume. Rather than letting the diverse text cohere rapidly into a conclusion which pulls all the strands together, as her brother Henry does in the final chapters of his expansive novels, Fielding instead lets go of the reins entirely. Family friend James Harris is invited to contribute two dramatic dialogues titled “Fashion” and “Much Ado” (both remaining technically in the epistolary form since an unnamed Gentleman sends them to an unnamed Friend for no particular reason, introduced with two short sentences.) Henry Fielding then contributes the next five letters, and finally Sarah adds the completely unconnected “A Vision,” a dream parable that she does not even try to pass off as part of her sequel to David Simple (the full title of Familiar Letters is Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple, and Some Others. To which is added, A Vision). “A Vision,” according to Bree, is “quite unlike anything else in the book, and in form, if not in moral intention, quite unlike anything else she ever wrote”.

There are two ways (among others) to interpret Fielding’s formless sense of form in Familiar Letters. The first way is to embrace it as indicative of the “heteroglossic representation of cultural interests,” as Hunter puts it. “Most eighteenth-century authors of novels genuinely cannot tell whether it is story, theme, or end that inspires their form,” Hunter writes. “The resultant competition between narrative and exposition — between didactic aim and a wish to entertain — leads to a vacillation among tones and a flexibility and adaptability of narrative facts and limits.” Fielding’s vacillations and juxtapositions of narrative structures is therefore in tune with what Hunter identifies as the characteristic mode of mid-eighteenth-century fiction, “when the novel usurped and modified the older and more tried forms . . . and there were stories, stories, stories — new and particular stories — everywhere. It was an exciting moment to be a writer and try to record it all — stories and situations — and laying out patterns was both a continuing challenge and a demonstration that no human closure was adequate, complete, or final.”

Another way of interpreting Fielding’s form is to read it as a rhetorical gesture designed to effectively advance her feminist political agenda. “In story after story Fielding returns to the plight of married women, nearly all of whom are entirely in the power of unsatisfactory husbands,” writes Bree. “And yet nowhere is any real alternative to marriage offered. However inadequate their husbands, wives must learn to submit; however inequitable the married state, it offers the only chance of fulfillment for a young gentlewoman.” Coupled with this is Fielding’s relentlessly recurring satire on women’s vanity and social hypocrisy. Her miscellaneous form in Familiar Letters could therefore be a way of highlighting the lack of any realistic alternatives to marriage. In a novel about women that avoids the story arc of a phallocentric wedding plot, perhaps the most viable alternative is to have no story arc at all. Women who undermine one another and themselves in order to feed a petty jealousy or vanity appear in stories that undermine their own sense of resolution. Just as few individual women in Familiar Letters end up married happily ever after with a gentlemen worthy of their regard, so does the novel as a whole avoid any kind of definitive resolution that endorses a male status quo. From this perspective, Familiar Letters is a quite bold and unexpected sequel to David Simple, the definitive description of companionate marriage in eighteenth-century literature.

Whatever the guiding principle behind the structure of Familiar Letters, it is clearly not designed to emphasize the evolution of character. It will not offer much to those students coming fresh from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel looking for psychological realism reflected in narrative form. The obvious first step for character development is to locate the main characters — and this is not immediately clear in Familiar Letters. The two most frequently recurring correspondents are Camilla and Cynthia, but they are largely indistinguishable in their moral perfection. Bree notes how the personalities of the letter writers in Familiar Letters who reappear from David Simple (Cynthia, Camilla, David, Valentine, Spatter, and Varnish) are “broadly in character,” but “none of this is taking the story of David and his friends — or any exploration of the implications of their attitudes to life — forward.” Quite unlike the effect of the epistolary in Richardson’s novels, the apathetic or nonexistent relationships between the correspondents in Familiar Letters are no doubt an important reason why most readers refuse to see it as a legitimate sequel to David Simple. “Moreover, only in the case of letters between characters in David Simple is there any clear impression of a relationship between writer and recipient (and even in these instances Fielding does not develop the relationships established in the earlier novel),” writes Bree. “In letters between other characters the individual circumstances of the writer and recipient, and their reasons for writing to each other, are described in a perfunctory way, if at all.” The characters rarely talk about themselves or even one another, choosing instead to offer brief moral commentaries on the third-party stories they relate and receive before moving on to the next one. This allows them to act as model readers, showing us Fielding’s premise that reading for moral improvement is a higher calling than reading for plot or for interest in character alone (at least not for a select few characters sustained throughout the entire novel). This narrative approach is so consistently followed through, and it comes as such a sharp contrast to the resolutely focused and emotional mode of David Simple, that one can only assume Fielding did it with a preconceived plan. Perhaps she is distancing herself from Richardson. “Most notable of all, perhaps, Fielding does not use the capacity of epistolary writing for self-revelation,” writes Bree. “In this way the narrative is disconcertingly distanced from the reader of Familiar Letters. Even the letter writer is often at two removes from the action, and the reader of the book is thus left attempting to engage with a second- or third-hand tale.” Henry Fielding steers us instead toward reading the novel as a practical conduct book structured as a moral miscellany:

Here [women readers] must learn, if they will please to attend, that the consummation of a Woman’s character, is to maintain the Qualities of Goodness, Tenderness, Affection and Sincerity, in the several social Offices and Duties of Life; and not to unite Ambition, Avarice, Luxury, and Wantonness in the Person of a Woman of the World, or to affect Folly, Childishness and Levity, under the Appellation of a fine Lady.

There is a certain stillness at the heart of Familiar Letters — one of the recurring situations is a woman simply wanting quiet and solitude among people who can mean more by talking less — so for all of the cold moral practicality of Fielding’s design, it is reassuring to remember that Richardson’s famous remark about Sarah’s superiority to Henry was in response to his re-reading Familiar Letters: “Well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did to me, that your late brother’s knowledge of it was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to your’s. His was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while your’s was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside.”

Henry’s sometimes contentious and patronizing preface to Familiar Letters touches on the important issue that is closely related to its epistolary form and its connection to the development of character: closure. Fielding, invested in his rivalry with Richardson, is no great advocate of the epistolary form. “I know not of any Difference between this, and any other way of writing Novels, save only, that by making use of Letters, the Writer is freed from the regular Beginnings and Conclusions of Stories, with some other Formalities, in which the Reader of Taste finds no less Ease and Advantage, than the Author himself.” Later theorists of the eighteenth-century novel find closure to be not simply a matter of convenience, but a central issue in the development and conception of fiction as it begins to distinguish itself from existing literary and para-literary genres. Hunter writes that one of the few constant traits of all eighteenth-century texts is a “common sense that closure is not to be trusted, that one may pretend to believe in closure or fake closure but that closure itself is not to be found in texts or in life unless the text or life just stops.” But the issue of closure is particularly important to sequels.

Critics who already appreciate Fielding’s innovations in form, her challenges to traditional novelistic expectations, or her ways of distancing herself from the powerful influences of Henry Fielding and Richardson, would find even more to add to their arguments if they were to consider Familiar Letters as a worthwhile sequel to David Simple. For example, Alexander Pettit’s “David Simple and the Attenuation of ‘Phallic Power’” is an intriguing article about Fielding’s challenges to the comic form of closure and all of the social and sexual politics which go along with it:

If I am right about the anti-phallic male, the ‘failed’ plots of these novels are part and parcel of their ‘subjects’ — not so much because, as Schellenberg argues, the main characters talk while their enemies act, but because plot accents the unwillingness of protagonists to act as genre asks them to: as affable sparks lunging from chapter to chapter, their penises the compasses that lead them explicitly to and implicitly through the climax of closure, into the long afternoon of twenty-something parenthood that comedy assures us is beyond our sphere of interest. But these novels suggest that this more mature manifestation of masculinity probably should command our attention in print as it does, and always has, outside of it.

Pettit may indeed be right, but his argument is not nearly as convincing as it could have been if he had read Familiar Letters. There is plenty of closure (phallocentric and otherwise) in this novel, but it is found story by story, not in the novel as a whole. A great many of the stories related in the letters are precisely the kind of conventional romance plots Pettit claims she does not write, sometimes with a twist ending that leaves “climax” as something disappointing, delayed, or deferred. Given Pettit’s thesis about Fielding’s political challenges to the male status quo via literary form and manipulations of closure, it would have been interesting to see what he would make of the structure-within-freedom form and the stinging social satire on domestic relations and marriage found in Familiar Letters.

Another approach to the issue of closure is to see it more as a function of character rather than of plot. “Characters do not have to be brought back from the dead in order to give them more life; details . . . can simply be dramatized, dragged out, and made into a revised or enlarged story; loops can be explored within the prescribed limits of life, plot elaborated in the middle as easily as extended at the end,” writes Hunter. While Hunter’s attention is not specifically on Sarah Fielding, his description of character-driven sequels applies more to Familiar Letters than to Volume the Last, illustrating the differences in how Fielding planned the two sequels to work as complementary pairs. Whereas Familiar Letters picks up the story at an uneventful time in the lives of the characters and assumes that “loops can be explored within the prescribed limits of life” (anecdotes and digressions-within-digressions that Henry calls “short Romances”), Volume the Last is much more plot-driven, beginning at the point when David’s life makes a radical shift and ending with his death. There is no pronounced sense of closure (or for that matter, opening) in Familiar Letters; it could just as easily have begun at a different point and ended at another. There is no farewell to the reader or bow at the curtain from the principal characters in Familiar Letters. In Volume the Last, however, Fielding ends on an ambiguous note that seems to deconstruct its gesture toward closure for the entire David Simple family of novels:

But now will I draw the Veil, and if any of my Readers chuse to drag David Simple from the Grave, to struggle again in this World, and to reflect, every Day, on the Vanity of its utmost Enjoyments, they may use their own Imaginations, and fancy David Simple still bustling about on this Earth. But I chuse to think he is escaped from the Possibility of falling into any future Afflictions, and that neither the Malice of his pretended Friends, nor the Sufferings of his real ones, can ever again rend and torment his honest Heart.

The phrase “I chuse to think” undercuts Fielding’s hard-won realism and authority as the controlling omniscient author. Her opinion about the ending is reduced to one among many — readers are invited to continue sequels of their own in their imaginations, as morbid as they may be. Fielding has her own strong opinions about the conclusion of David Simple, but she recognizes that his true place is in the hearts and minds of readers, not exclusively in the text of a novel which inevitably has to have a final page. The limits of the sequel are scripted, but not bound.

The three volumes of David Simple represent the century’s single most ambitious experiment in the still-undefined genre of the sequel. Read individually, David Simple, Familiar Letters, and Volume the Last are interesting and entertaining novels. Read as a sequence, however, these three novels prove Sarah to be an innovator in form and genre to rival her brother Henry. We typically expect sequels to stay within the same stylistic boundaries as the original. Then as now, readers expect authors to give us pleasant reunions with our favorite characters, similar modes of action and sentiment, a prose style in the same familiar voice, and, in short, all the things that attracted us to the original in the first place (with an extra dose of “what happened to them next”). We expect a second helping of more-or-less the same dish. This is exactly the opposite of Fielding’s approach. David Simple is a sentimental picaresque comedy, but Familiar Letters is a miscellany of moral anecdotes, while Volume the Last is a domestic tragedy. Between the three works, including the variety of interpolated tales in Familiar Letters, almost the entire range of popular eighteenth-century narrative styles are represented. This part of Fielding’s achievement goes completely unrecognized if readers see only David Simple and Volume the Last, or at best it gets reduced to the over-simplification that Fielding sees literature in the monochromatic dichotomy of a comic original and a tragic sequel. If more of Sarah’s readers would take Henry’s advice and become familiar with Familiar Letters, then “much more Advantage may accrue to the Reader, than the Good-nature and Sensibility of the Age have, to their immortal Honour, bestowed on the Author.”

(Notes and bibliography omitted to discourage plagiarism. See the original in On Second Thought: Updating the Eighteenth-Century Text, ed. Elizabeth Kraft and Debra Taylor Bourdeau. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. 83–111.)