ABSTRACT
From its inception, the evolution of Jane Shore legend has, for the most part, followed developments in popular culture. Whether audiences were consuming ballads and poetry, drama, prose narrative, or the novel, Jane Shore found her way into the popular corpus. The "Cinderella" principle is prominent in a number of texts, both fiction and non-fiction. The fantasy of the beautiful common woman who entrances a king is archetypal; it is perhaps even more appealing today in a nominally "classless" society in which royalty is still the stuff of myth. Recent historically-oriented scholarship, influenced by Feminism and Cultural Materialism should, by the dictates of common sense, surely run counter to this, but in many ways has become entangled with it with some less than propitious results. In the first half of the century, the novels' representation of Shore's sexuality remains understated, to say the least.
