ABSTRACT
The History of Lady Julia Mandeville is an exemplary text both for the significance of friendship, and for the development of the novel genre in the later Hanoverian period. Published after Frances Brooke’s success as a translator of Madame de Riccoboni’s Letters from Juliet, Lady Catesby, to her Friend, Lady Henrietta Campley (1760), her first novel combines formal and thematic elements of different narrative modes emerging in the eighteenth century, including sentimental, Gothic, melodramatic, and realist styles. Friendship dominates the homo-and heterosocial relationships in the story and features as a quality of romantic affection. The absence of the friendship virtues of equal confidence and mutual respect in family relations contributes to the main conflict of the plot.
