This dissertation focuses on the many tales of distressed women found in mid-eighteenthcenturyBritish magazines and essay serials. On the one hand, I argue, scenes of "virtue indistress" and amatory fiction more generally demonstrate the increasing commercialization ofliterature and the rise of the sentimental reader.

On the other hand, they reveal the periodicalwriters' drive to educate readers both in and through the passions. I propose that two factorscomplicate the pathos of these narratives.

In the first place, the periodical form was thought towork against the arousal of vehement passions. In the second place, even if such passions couldbe raised in the miscellaneous format, there were moral reasons why indolent, distractedperiodical readers craving sympathetic identification should not be indulged.

Driven by marketforces and yet constrained by the unique nature of periodical publication, writers of miscellaniesresponded 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 thechallenges and risks associated with raising powerful feelings on the limited canvas of theperiodical, some periodicalists worked to suppress or otherwise complicate the most affectingaspects 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 passionateresponse. .