Abstract: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s controversial interclass romance Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and its English translation Eloisa: Or, A Series of Original Letters (1761) were noteworthy commercial successes in mid-eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. By examining commentary by the novel’s first wave of British and Irish readers from 1760–1785, this article recovers how a publishing phenomenon provoked a diversity of reading responses and stoked debates regarding feminine propriety, social rank, and romantic autonomy. Alongside major figures in eighteenth-century literature and culture such as James Beattie, Frances Burney, Thomas Gray, Anna Seward, and Horace Walpole, two key clusters of readers are considered. The article contends that men of the middle ranks (including James Boswell, Richard Hurd, and William Warburton) were validated by the central romance, wherein an aristocratic woman recognizes the intellectual merit of an untitled suitor, while women across social ranks (Sarah Hurst, the Ladies of Llangollen) interpreted the text as supporting womens’ romantic autonomy.

Rousseau’s British Readers and the Eloisa Effect

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Category	Quartile
HISTORY	1