Henry Mackenzie’s third and last novel was one of the better known works to emerge in the wake of Rousseau’s , in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. Immediately popular with contemporaries, it seems nonetheless to have been something of a ’novelist’s novel’, and has fared poorly since compared with the briefer, less complex Man of Feeling, which caught the mood of an entire generation before becoming a historical curiosity. Although Julia de Roubigne offers a more extended and reflective consideration of sensibility than the earlier novel, it has escaped the attention of twentieth- century readers and critics. |