Download or read book The Life of Madame de Beaumount and The Life of Charlotta du Pont written by Penelope Aubin and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.