In 1810 a certain "G." or "S.G.," whose full name was Sarah Green, wrote, besides some actual history and an attempt at the historical novel, a very curious and rather hybrid book entitled _Romance Readers and Romance Writers_.

Its preface is an instance of "Women, beware Women," for though it stigmatises male creatures, such as a certain Curteis and a certain Pickersgill, it treats Lady Morgan (then only Sydney Owenson) and "Rosa Matilda" even more roughly and asks (as has been asked about a hundred years later and was asked about a hundred years before), "Is it not amazing that the [two] most licentious writers of romance are women ?" And it starts with a burlesque account of a certain Margaret Marsham who exclaims, "What then?
to add to my earthly miseries am I to be called Peggy?
My name is Margari_tt_a!" "I am sure that if I am called Peggy again I shall go into a fit." But this promise of something to complete the trio with _Northanger Abbey_ and _The Heroine_ (to be presently mentioned) is not maintained.

Not only does the writer force the note of parody too much by making "Margaritta" say to herself, "Poor persecuted _dove_ that I am," and adore a labourer's shirt on a hedge, but she commits the far more fatal fault of exchanging her jest for earnest.

Margaritta--following her romance-models--falls a victim to an unprincipled great lady and the usual wicked baronet--at whose head, one is bound to say, she flings herself with such violence as no baronet could possibly resist.

Her sister Mary, innocent of romance-reading and all other faults, is, though not as guilty, as unlucky almost as Margaret: and by far the greater part of the book is an unreal presentment, in nearly the worst manner of the eighteenth century itself, of virtuous curates, _un_virtuous "tonish" rectors, who calmly propose to seduce their curates' daughters (an offence which, for obvious reasons, must, in the worst times, have been unusual), libertine ladies, and reckless "fashionables" of all kinds.