We turn now to a character who appears in every way the opposite of Lady Townly. Indeed, she may have been a character composed to answer back to another conventional stage type: not the town lady, but the shrewd country maidservant swift to exploit the predatory instincts of the young men in the household she serves. In Samuel Richardson’s novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, first published on 6 November 1740, a fifteen-year-old servant girl stoutly resists her young master, Mr B, in his attempts to seduce her. Mr B, his sister Lady Davers, the servants who abet his endeavours, all finally acknowledge Pamela's virtue and the capacity of her writing, the letter-memoir she writes recording her persecution, to bring others to virtue. Mr B persecutes Pamela, abducts her to his remote country estate, but finally sets her free; Pamela returns of her own volition to him and he offers her honourable marriage. The novel was an instant hit, enabling its printer-author to expand his London premises behind Salisbury Court in 1741. He published a continuation on 7 December 1741. Both parts were printed together in the sixth edition on 8 May 1742.

Responses to Pamela are legion and proliferate across media – from William Hogarth's expensive engravings, to a fan illustrating scenes from the novel, to verse rejoinders, to earnest works of criticism. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela also, however, swiftly attracted satirical re-presentation, which recast the heroine's virtuous resistance to Mr B's advances as a strategic manipulation to secure her best future advantage. In this respect – a scepticism informing the reception by audiences of their marital settlements – there is an affinity between the fine lady who reforms herself (Lady Townly) under threat of punishment, and the country girl who reforms others (Pamela) through her own virtuous example.

Pamela as character has, I suggest, ‘sway’. Gumbrecht glosses sway as occupying space in a vertical dimension: sway is ‘emergence and its result: being there’. It is a bodily presence that exerts influence by virtue of that occupation. Both the book and character of Pamela are in the eighteenth century recognised as ‘novel’, as birthing a new kind of fiction from the romance and novel forms that pre-existed it.