The Excellence of Falsehood

"The only excellence of falsehood... is its resemblance to truth," proclaims a clergyman in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote . He argues that romances are bad art; novels, he implies, are better. This clergyman's remarks—repeating what literary and moral authorities had been saying since the late seventeenth century—are central to Deborah Ross's discussion of romance characteristics in English women's novels. Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Fanny Burney, Ann