Juvenal was the satirist’s satirist, a writer whose output consisted only of poems in that genre. An uncompromising cataloguer of the crimes of Romans, Juvenal was also intensely masculine, his oeuvre implicitly addressed to men, with one satire (vi) devoted to the shameful derelictions of women (the source of much unimaginatively imitative misogyny during the Restoration). Juvenal’s obscenity, and the exclusion of women from classical learning, added to the sense that Juvenal was not suitable source material for aspirant women writers. This chapter, however, working from Penny Wilson’s sense of an “economy of makeshifts” in women’s engagement in classical literature, examines the cracks in that monolithic facade, starting with Juvenal’s own text, which contains an oddly sympathetic female satirist. Women did read Juvenal fairly extensively, albeit often in translation, and women writers did confront, adapt, and rework Juvenalian phrasing and attitudes in a wide range of forms – poetry, fiction, journalism, diaries. While there was no linear process of rapprochement between women writers and the foundational text of male satire, nor any single “female” mode of responding to that legacy, women writers found a surprising number of ways to absorb and transform it in their own satiric work.

The second chapter considers the use of chivalric romance tropes in Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin, an Armenian. Written in English by himself (1792). In Emin’s letters to his Bluestocking patronesses Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Catherine Talbot, he plays a humble knight errant or “Persian Slave” as a strategy to master British politeness. In doing so, he befriends patrons such as George Lyttleton, Edmund Burke, and William Augustus Duke of Cumberland, the youngest son of King George II and commander of a German army Emin had joined in 1757. His epistolary interaction with the Bluestockings who coproduced his romantic fantasies allows him to identify Persian-Islamic notions of chivalry with British liberty. His memoir records ironic episodes in which he affiliates with brotherly Muslim warriors during his Islamophobic quest to liberate his people in the Caucasus from Ottoman and Persian despots. Such affinities render him a patriotic English gentleman while his lady friends expand their civic roles by adopting cosmopolitan identities, an exchange that compensates for a British manhood scarred by military failures during the Seven Years’ War.