Excerpts from "Novel Reading, A Cause of Female Depravity"
(from the Monthly Mirror, November 1797)

I now begin to hope I shall see good old days come round again--that moderately stiff stays, covered elbows, and concealed bosoms, will soon be prevailing fashions; and, what is of far greater importance, that chastity--pure and spotless CHASTITY!-- will once more be the darling attribute of women.

(essayist believes that depravity has become "fashionable" among women)

I have been at some trouble to trace to its source this great calamity [female depravity] . . . and I find those who made novel-reading an indispensable branch in forming the minds of young women, have a great deal to answer for. Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.

A girl with her intellectual powers enervated by such a course of reading, falls an easy prey to the first boy who assumes the languishing lover. He has only to stuff a piece of dirty paper into the crevice of her window, full of thous and thees and thys and mellifluous compounds hyeroglyphically spelled, perhaps, and Miss is not long in finding out that "many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.

And yet this, bad as it is, is not the worst result of such pernicious reading. It is no uncommon thing for a young lady who has attended her dearest friend to the altar, a few months after a marriage which, perhaps, but for her, had been a happy one, to fix her affections on her dearest friend's husband, and by artful blandishments allure him to herself. Be not staggered, moral reader, at the recital! Such serpents are really in existence.

"And was novel-reading the cause of this?" inquires some gentle fair one . . . "was novel-reading the foundation of such frail conduct?" I answer yes! It is the school the poor deluded female imbibes erroneous principles, and from thence pursues a flagrantly vicious line of conduct; it is there she is told that love is involuntary, and that attachments of the heart are decreed by fate. Impious reasoning.