The works of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe: in four volumes

London: printed for John & Arthur Arch, Grace-Church Street, & Sylvester Doig, Edinburgh, 1796. 4 volumes, small 8vo, pp. [v], 5, [3], 310; vii, [1], 317, [1]; [2], v, [2], 8-343, [1]; [9], 8-388; leaf with 4 printed spine labels bound in as part of the front matter in volume IV; contemporary and likely original full speckled calf, gilt-decorated spines, black morocco labels and numbering pieces; lightly rubbed; very good and sound. An attractive set. Rowe (1674-1737) was among the most widely read authors in 18th-century England. (Witness this collection published 60 years after her death.) "Her works were reprinted nearly annually until 1855, (truncated) out of print by 1860, and in 1897 she was not even mentioned in A Dictionary of English Authors ... [However], recent scholars have interpreted Rowe as a pivotal figure in the development of the English novel: Rowe borrowed stock characters and situations from the late 17th and early 18th-century French and Italian romances popular in England, transforming the outward struggles to save the body of the heroine from seducers, to saving the mind and soul of the heroine from the corrupt world through the virtuous self-control that results from contemplation, thus sealing the plot trajectory of subsequent fiction as evidenced in later novels such as Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Frances Burney's Cecilia. The proto-feminist and amatory significance of Rowe's literary contribution continues to be reassessed against her moral and didactic themes." See Ezell, Margaret, Writing Women's Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 105–106; and, Backscheider, Paula, Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. pp. 122–207, as noted in Wikipedia. (Inventory #: 67001)