Abstract

The article explores the literary significance of Elizabeth Steele’s The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley (1787) and considers the relationship between satire and sentiment in the self-representations of late eighteenth-century courtesans. The Memoirs establishes the courtesan Sophia Baddeley as a sentimental heroine and translates her experience of domestic violence and sexual double standards into a satire of fashionable society. Elizabeth Steele’s narrative therefore anticipates the sentimental self-portraits of nineteenth-century women writers and looks back to an earlier tradition of the referential scandal chronicle. In addition, it reveals the impact of the commercial exchanges of the literary marketplace on female self-representations.