ABSTRACT
Daniel Defoe's Roxana set a pattern for how readers were meant to interpret the female libertine. The Preface to the novel directs the reader to reject its heroine, and anyone who has taught Roxana undoubtedly agree that even twenty-first-century students dislike her, more often than not condemning Roxana for her mercenary motives for sex and marriage and poor mothering. Novelists following Defoe took the lesson in his Preface seriously, scorning the female libertine for her immorality. Henry Fielding, more generous to the female libertine figure than his contemporaries, nevertheless includes a vicious portrait in Lady Bellaston's character in Tom Jones. The novel presents three versions of the figure, but Lady Bellaston, a town lady with Hobbesian characteristics, emerges as the most diabolical. William Makepeace Thackeray, Fielding's literary heir in the nineteenth century, depicts several female libertines that resemble Restoration and eighteenth-century characters and novels. His works clearly articulate the division between the heroines of sensibility and female libertine figures.
