What Makes Lindamira a Great Story?

The Adventures of Lindamira from 1702 mimics the best of popular late 17th-century French, Spanish, and Italian novels of aristocratic romantic intrigues, with all the emotional ups and downs and the issues that build angst and anticipation to make a riveting tale, yet this story is far more concise, brings the cultural setting down to the upper-middle-class, and provides an innovative true-to-life perspective while including entertaining homages to its foreign-language predecessors' unrealistic tales.

Lindamira is young, beautiful, wealthy, independent-minded, and virtuous, but not always as kind and rational as she desires to be. Multiple suitors of various quality pursue her, but the courtship process can be painful and confusing even when things go well, and often they don't go well. Reflecting back on her life, she confides the details in 25 letters to her trusted friend Indamora, in which she confides her romantic adventures, beginning when she was 16 years old.

What Else Makes Lindamira So Special?

• The first romance novel written in English
• The 300-year-old authorship mystery solved
• The oldest English romance novel written as contemporary that became historical
• Inspiration for the first fan fiction based on an English romance novel
• 18th-century international best-seller