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In addition to its importance to the study of the development of Lennox as a novelist, Harriot Stuart is significant as well for its heroine who, while possessing many of the outward characteristics of the sentimental heroine of the day, ultimately breaks with this tradition to stand as a model for the strong, passionate, and individualistic heroines who were to become so important to the English novel in the second half of the eighteenth century and beyond Written in the popular memoir form, The Life of Harriot Stuart is also intriguing to us for what it reveals, via the use Lennox herself made of it later in her life, of the struggles of an ambitious, shrewd, independent-minded woman writer to be at once professionally accepted and thus economically secure, and yet to maintain her identity. Faced with a literary marketplace where professional well-being necessitated female deference to such influential male writers as Johnson and Richardson, and a marriage that required the same of her as a wife, Lennox allowed the facts of Harriot's life to be viewed as autobiographical. The life of her first heroine seems to have provided Lennox with an escape, serving as a kind of wish-fulfillment later in a life that did not give her opportunities for strong, passionate, individualistic behavior As several critics have shown, Harriot Stuart adds to our knowledge of the facts of Lennox's life, yet the novel also reveals the subversive, sustaining power of fiction for the eighteenth-century woman writer faced with the question of female identity and self-revelation/identification. Harriot Stuart is also one of the first British novels partially set in America and is also interesting for its innovative use of the captivity narrative as a vehicle for social criticism. Assuming her audience's familiarity with works in the popular genre, such as Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God ... A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration, published in Boston in 1682, Lennox introduces the savage, as she does the pirate, only to question their validity as stereotypical manifestations of the criminal and violent
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