About This Book
The unfinished comedy is set in a Surrey garden and stages a satiric contest of courtship and sentiment among relatives, suitors, and talkative friends. A pontificating professor advances a theory of the devoted widow while an exacting uncle polices his niece Astraea's enforced sanctity and admirers like Arden press their suit. Comic figures—a teasing wife, sympathetic companions, and gossiping ladies—reveal tensions between public oratory and private desire, teasing out the contradictions of fashionable sentimentalities about marriage, widowhood, and moral display through witty scenes and argumentative exchanges.
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