Introduction Rites of Initiation: Reading Epic in Eighteenth-Century Britain Returning to Narrative Origins: Finding Alternatives in Vergil's Aeneid Dido in Barbados: The Case of Spectato r Part 1: Demythologizing Dido: Epic and Romance 1 "'Pulcherrima Dido': Jane Barker and the Epic of Exile" The "Glory of the Scipio's"? Exilius' Romance Rewriting of History Resembling Dido: Reinventing Carthage and Rome Becoming Roman: Exilius and Jacobite Identity Representing Troy Town: Barker's Jacobite Nostalgia 2. "'What is there of a Woman Worth Relating?' Revising the Aeneid in Henry Fielding's Amelia "A Fortress on a Rock": New Epic Foundations in Amelia "A Good Woman and Yet": Harrison and Epic Precedents Dalila, Jezebel, Medea? Miss Mathews Mrs. Bennet-Atkinson and "All the Fortune given her by her Father" Part 2: Mythologizing Cleopatra: Romance Historiography and the Queens of Egypt 3. "'Making History out of Nothing': Creating a Women's Classical Canon in Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote" The Example of Outlandish People: Romance Values and the Geopolitical Landscape Laws of its Own: An Empire of Love? "But for the famous Scudéry": Reviving Classical Precedents "A Position almost too Evident for Proof": Arabella and the Divine 4. "'Shame'--or 'Courtly Glory'? Scripting Augustan History in Sarah Fielding's Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia" On Pleasing Delusions: Reading The Lives Against the Grain Imagining Power: Fielding's Cleopatra and the Construction of History Being Made a Sacrifice: Octavia and Roman Virtue 5. "Whose 'Wild and Extravagant Stories'? Challenging Epic in Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance" Epic in Prose: Redefining Women's Fiction Revising Origins: The Bible as Oriental Tale Penelope, Medea, Deianeira: Classical Epic Revisited Seizing Narrative Control: Lessons from Cleopatra and Scheherazade.