This dissertation focuses on the many tales of distressed women found in mid-eighteenthcentury
British magazines and essay serials. On the one hand, I argue, scenes of "virtue in
distress" and amatory fiction more generally demonstrate the increasing commercialization of
literature and the rise of the sentimental reader. On the other hand, they reveal the periodical
writers' drive to educate readers both in and through the passions. I propose that two factors
complicate the pathos of these narratives. In the first place, the periodical form was thought to
work against the arousal of vehement passions. In the second place, even if such passions could
be raised in the miscellaneous format, there were moral reasons why indolent, distracted
periodical readers craving sympathetic identification should not be indulged. Driven by market
forces and yet constrained by the unique nature of periodical publication, writers of miscellanies
responded with ingenuity to these challenges, crafting and deploying literary depictions of
"virtue in distress" that suited this compressed and constrained medium. In part because of the
challenges and risks associated with raising powerful feelings on the limited canvas of the
periodical, some periodicalists worked to suppress or otherwise complicate the most affecting
aspects of their amatory fictions. Others strove to correct the reader's passions in their operation;
and others still called into question, elsewhere in their periodicals, the suitability of a passionate
response.
