This collection of essays explores the role played by imaginative writing in the Scottish Enlightenment and its interaction with the values and activities of that movement. Across a broad range of areas via specially commissioned essays by experts in each field, the volume examines the reciprocal traffic between the groundbreaking intellectual project of eighteenth-century Scotland and the imaginative literature of the period, demonstrating that the innovations made by the Scottish literati laid the foundations for developments in imaginative writing in Scotland and further afield. In doing so, it provide a context for the widespread revaluation of the literary culture of the Scottish Enlightenment and the part that culture played in the project of Enlightenment.

Ruth Perry describes the transformation of the English family as a function of several major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century including the development of a market economy and waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the 'rise' of the middle class, and the development of print culture. In particular, Perry traces the shift from a kinship orientation based on blood relations to a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties as it is revealed in popular literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. Perry focuses particularly on the effect these changes had on women's position in families. She uses social history, literary analysis and anthropological kinship theory to examine texts by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Henry MacKenzie, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and many others. This important study by a leading eighteenth-century scholar will be of interest to social and literary historians.

In Novel Relations, Ruth Perry describes the transformation of the English family as a function of several major social changes taking place in the eighteenth century including the development of a market economy and waged labor, enclosure and the redistribution of land, urbanization, the 'rise' of the middle class, and the development of print culture. In particular Perry traces the shift from a kinship orientation based on blood relations to a kinship axis constituted by conjugal ties as it is revealed in popular literature of the second half of the eighteenth century. Perry focuses particularly on the effect these changes had on women's position in families. She uses social history, literary analysis and anthropological kinship theory to examine texts by Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Henry MacKenzie, Frances Burney, Jane Austen, and many others. This important study by a leading eighteenth-century scholar will be of interest to social and literary historians.

When I found myself in a new role as caregiver I was terrified. I couldn't find any written material that would help me in the problems I was facing. My husband had just returned home from the rehabilitation center of the hospital after suffering a severe stroke. We plundered through our experiences using trial and error finally finding solutions. Through humor and laughter and tears, this book was written to help another new caregiver.

As an orphan under the care of her selfish aunt who pressures her to convert to Catholicism and enter a loveless marriage, Henrietta learns to live by her wits. Henrietta's story draws attention to the difficulty for women of earning a living in mid-eighteenthcentury England and offers readers strikingly insightful and modern reflections on human nature. Charlotte Lennox was a friend of both Samuel Richardson and Samuel Johnson and was generally admired by many of their contemporaries. A major influence on Jane Austen, Lennox is an innovator in the tradition of English women's fiction. Out of print since the late eighteenth century, Henrietta is now available in an edited and fully annotated modern edition.