ABSTRACT
The 'Clarissa Ideal' was re-worked to varying degrees by Lennox and Sheridan to expose the inevitable impropriety of feminine subjectivity in the eighteenth century, no matter how it was constructed. Fenwick's novel, Secresy (1796), achieves something similar, though from a different perspective: through an extensive engagement with Burkean counter-revolutionary ideology, the text, I argue, speaks of dread on behalf of the female subject.
