A year before publishing The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gained international attention with his best-selling epistolary novel Julie, or the New Héloïse (1761), which updated the 12th-century forbidden romance story of Héloïse and Abelard. Julie, the new Héloïse, falls in love with her tutor Saint-Preux but yields to her authoritarian father’s demand that she marry Wolmar, an older Russian soldier.

18th-century readers responded with extraordinary emotion. Critics and admirers alike reported being overwhelmed, and the novel quickly went through numerous editions and translations. Reading Julie modeled a new form of empathy, encouraging identification with characters across boundaries of class, sex, and nation.

Novels drew readers into identifying with ordinary people unknown to them. Through fictional letter exchanges, epistolary novels taught a new psychology and laid the foundations for a new social and political order. They made middle-class heroines and even servants, like the eponymous protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, the equals of rich men, demonstrating that people shared fundamentally similar inner feelings and dramatizing the universal desire for autonomy. The chapter notes that the period’s most influential novels of psychological identification—Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48) and Rousseau’s Julie (1761)—appeared just before the concept of the rights of “man” crystallized.

Empathy is universal and rooted in the brain’s biology, but cultures shape how it is expressed. In the 18th century, readers learned to extend empathy across traditional social boundaries, seeing strangers as like themselves. Without this learning process, “equality” could have no deep meaning or political consequence.

The epistolary novel’s rise between the 1760s and 1780s coincided with expanding literacy and a surge in fiction about ordinary life; by 1789, French novel production had more than doubled since midcentury. While peasants read rarely, urban servants did. Ordinary heroes and heroines became household names, displacing aristocratic protagonists common in 17th-century fiction. Scholars often link the novel’s rise to capitalism, the middle class, the public sphere, the nuclear family, and nationalism; this chapter focuses instead on the novel’s psychological effects and their connection to the emergence of the rights of “man.”

In epistolary fiction, there is no authorial point of view outside the action; the perspective is the characters’ as expressed in their letters. Editors—Richardson and Rousseau styled themselves as such—heightened realism by obscuring authorship. The form fostered identification by constructing “character” through interiority. In Pamela, for instance, the heroine narrates her employer Mr. B’s attempts to seduce her directly to her parents. With no narrator mediating, the reader experiences both her peril and her insistence on self-possession.

Richardson’s works ignited cultural phenomena. Pamela spurred multiple editions, parodies, theatrical adaptations, and even public celebrations. Clarissa followed with high expectations; its tragic plot—Clarissa’s flight from a coerced marriage, Lovelace’s seduction and rape, her refusal of his repentant proposal, and her death—devastated readers across Europe and inspired immediate translations. Although some contemporaries mocked Richardson’s “tedious lamentations,” many found themselves absorbed as if living among the Harlowe family.

Men and women alike identified with female heroines. Readers wrote of intense attachment to Julie, often identifying with her rather than with Saint-Preux or Wolmar. Her struggle to master passion and live virtuously became their own. By its form, the epistolary novel suggested that all selves possessed interiority and were, in that sense, equal. The exchange of letters turned a servant like Pamela into a model of proud autonomy rather than a stereotype of the downtrodden. Clarissa and Julie similarly came to stand for individuality itself.

Contemporaries knew from experience that novels affected bodies as well as minds, but they disagreed about consequences. Clergy and physicians warned that novels could erode morality and religion, excite eroticism, and inspire imitation of vice. Some, like Samuel-Auguste Tissot, linked novel reading to harmful excesses. Others feared novels would foment discontent among servants and young women. To counter the genre’s disrepute, Richardson emphasized moral intent, and Rousseau framed Julie with a preface that rehearsed common objections to novels before proceeding anyway.

Defenders developed a positive account centered on Clarissa’s power to evoke compassion for ordinary people. Philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot, eulogizing Richardson in 1761, emphasized the reader’s immersion, recognition of self in characters, and the experience of living many lives in a few hours as a form of moral education.

The British aristocrat Henry Home, Lord Kames, gave the most sustained philosophical account in Elements of Criticism (1762), arguing that fiction creates an “ideal presence” or “waking dream” in which readers imagine incidents as unfolding before them. This “ideal presence” fosters morality by strengthening social bonds and motivating benevolence. Thomas Jefferson shared this view. In 1771, when advising Robert Skipwith, he placed fiction—including works by Sterne, Fielding, Marmontel, Goldsmith, Richardson, and Rousseau—at the center of a reading list, asserting that imaginative literature could imprint both principles and practices of virtue more effectively than history.

At stake was the valorization of ordinary secular life as morality’s foundation. For critics, sympathy with a novelistic heroine signaled decadence; for defenders, aroused passion could reshape the inner self and produce a more moral society. In practice, writers like Richardson and Rousseau drew readers into daily life as a kind of substitute religious experience, teaching appreciation of the ordinary and the capacity of people like themselves to create a moral world. The concept of universal, natural rights grew from these feelings: Equality flourished when people learned to think of others as like themselves through identification with fictional characters.

Female heroines were compelling because their quest for autonomy could never fully succeed in law and custom. Pamela marries Mr. B, accepting implied limits on her freedom; Clarissa dies rather than marry Lovelace; Julie renounces Saint-Preux and dies. While modern critics sometimes see martyrdom, contemporaries often saw will and personality. Readers wanted not only to save the heroines but also to be like them. The central drama in all three novels is the heroine’s will for independence, with male characters’ actions highlighting that will. Through empathizing with these heroines, readers learned that all people—even women—aspired to autonomy and could imagine the psychological effort that struggle entailed.

18th-century novels reflected a deeper cultural preoccupation with autonomy. Enlightenment thinkers framed freedom as individual self-governance, culminating in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), which defined Enlightenment as humanity’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity. Earlier, philosophers Hugo Grotius and John Locke had reimagined legitimate authority as a compact among autonomous men, prompting educational reforms that emphasized reasoning over punishment. Rousseau in Emile urged parents to cultivate and protect their children’s inner lives; Welsh philosopher Richard Price, in a 1776 pamphlet, defined liberty as self-direction.

Reformers sought to widen the scope of individual decision-making. French revolutionary family law illustrates the shift: In the years immediately after the Revolution, the National Assembly abolished primogeniture (the right of the firstborn male child to inherit his parents’ estate) and lettres de cachet (orders from the king that could not be appealed), created family councils for disputes, mandated equal inheritance for sons and daughters, lowered the age of majority to 21, ended adult paternal authority, and introduced divorce on equal grounds for men and women. In Britain and its North American colonies, law changed more slowly, but cultural trends favored autonomy. Despite the restrictive Marriage Act of 1753, patriarchal domination waned, and literature—from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791)—celebrated independence. American states began to accept divorce petitions after independence; in Revolutionary France, about 20,000 divorces were granted between 1792 and 1803.

As autonomy expanded, a dilemma emerged: What would bind communities of self-directed individuals? Midcentury Scottish philosophers centered the answer on “sympathy,” which this book calls “empathy” to stress the active will to identify with others. Francis Hutcheson treated sympathy as a moral faculty that drew people beyond self-interest. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) explained how imaginative identification—he used the example of torture—allows observers to feel another’s pain and develop an “impartial spectator” within, joining autonomy to empathy.

Sympathy and sensibility resonated widely in the late 18th century. Jefferson read Hutcheson and Smith but cited Laurence Sterne as offering “the best course of morality.” The first American novel, published in 1789, was titled The Power of Sympathy. Sensibility permeated literature, painting, and medicine, even prompting worries about excess.

Sympathy aided many disenfranchised groups, but women were often left out. Early abolitionists leveraged novelistic techniques in firsthand narratives like Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789)—the autobiography of a formerly enslaved man who became a leading abolitionist—yet most failed to connect antislavery to women’s rights. After 1789, many French revolutionaries supported rights for Protestants, Jews, free people of color, and even enslaved people while opposing political rights for women. In the United States, slavery provoked immediate debate; women’s political rights received far less attention.

Women were widely viewed as dependents defined by family status and thus not fully capable of political autonomy. They could symbolize self-determination as a private, moral virtue—as in novels like Pamela and Clarissa—without implying political rights. In 1789, Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès distinguished natural and civil rights from political rights: All inhabitants, including women, enjoyed protection of person, property, and liberty (passive citizenship), but only some were active citizens with the right to participate directly in public affairs. His qualifier—“at least in the present state”—left a narrow opening for change.

Advocates of women’s rights often expressed ambivalence about novels. Traditional opponents cast women as especially susceptible to romantic enchantment, and even defenders like Thomas Jefferson later worried about young girls’ “inordinate passion” for novels. British philosopher and early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) contrasted novel reading with rational, active study, yet she wrote and reviewed novels avidly.

Learning to empathize opened the path to the rights of “man,” but not for everyone at once. No one understood this better than Jefferson. In 1802, he wrote that the United States was acting for all humankind by testing how much freedom and self-government a society could entrust to its members. He pushed to expand participation as widely as he could imagine—primarily to white men, and perhaps to Indigenous men if they became farmers. Although he recognized that enslaved people had human rights, he continued to participate actively in their enslavement. He did not envision a polity in which they or women of any race took an active part. For most Americans and Europeans of his era, even decades later, that remained the outer limit of the imaginable.