terrahome 's review for:

The Coquette by Hannah W. Foster

2.0

---

Coquette is essentially Samuel Richardson's Pamela except written by a woman. As such, it's certainly the preferable version of Pamela, particularly in terms of brevity, but still a frustrating work overall. There are a lot of moments in this novel where it seems like Foster almost makes the step of calling out the Puritan, Gender Essentialist, Chastity-Obsessed morality of her era. Eliza is certainly made out to be a sympathetic character in spite of her "flaws" and her "flaws" are given numerous explanations on page. By giving voice to the perspective of Sanford, Foster also calls attention to the insidious mindset of predatory men, and at the end even has one character point on how his continued existence in upper society is essentially rich people being complicit with his actions. And yet again and again, the book moralizes against Eliza's concerns about the constraints of marriage and the double standard surrounding woman being allowed to flirt in high society. In the end, it's just another conformist text to the misogynist beliefs of its era.