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Clara Reeve |
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When Clara Reeve died in 1807, the Gentleman's Magazine paid a dignified tribute to the well-known writer. "Her works," read the notice, "discover her to have cultivated useful knowledge with considerable success; and to have applied that knowledge less frivolously than is frequently the case with female Authors." Reeve might have resented the remark about women writers: as early as her first work, a collection of poems published in 1769, she praised the efforts of literary women; and her later attempts at moral and pedagogical reform, which she presented through the character Frances Darnford in her novels The School for Widows (1791) and Plans of Education (1792), centered largely on the problems of educating young ladies. The conservative tendency of the notice, though, aptly reflects her own views about fiction and its moral mission. In her exploration of the history of romance, The Progress of Romance (1785), she remarked, "The great and important duty of a writer is, to point out the difference between Virtue and Vice, to shew one rewarded, and the other punished....
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