Henry Fielding: A Memoir: Including Newly Discovered Letters and Records with Illustrations from Contemporary Prints

Henry Fielding invented the English novel. Before him, there was no template for the sprawling, comic, morally complex prose fiction that would define the genre for centuries. This memoir, drawing on newly discovered letters and contemporary records, traces the arc of that extraordinary life: from privileged beginnings at Sharpham Park in Somersetshire, through the wrenching loss of his mother and his family's subsequent descent into financial precarity, to his years as a playwright, novelist, and finally a London magistrate wielding his pen and his authority against the corruptions of his age. Godden reconstructs not merely the public achievements but the private wounds that shaped Fielding's prosecutorial wit and his insistence, in novel after novel, that character is forged by circumstance. The memoir illuminates the man behind 'Tom Jones' and 'Joseph Andrews' - a writer whose humor masked genuine moral urgency, and whose life was as improbable and daring as any plot he invented. For readers who have loved Fielding's fiction, this volume offers the rare chance to understand the mind that conceived it.