Charlotte Lennox chose to adapt only one of her novels for the stage: Henrietta (1758). Her five-act comedy entitled The Sister opened on 18 February 1769 at George Colman the Elder's Haymarket theatre over a decade after Henrietta was first published. A novel by the writer who was the subject of our previous chapter, Henry Fielding, provided a source for the opening chapter of Henrietta. The reader meets the eponymous heroine pleading to join the company in a crowded stagecoach. The scene is a conscious imitation of that in the twelfth chapter of Henry Fielding's The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742). Henrietta Courtenay's fate is less severe than that of Joseph Andrews: Joseph is beaten, robbed and thrown into a ditch, while Henrietta is only introduced to two admirers, a predatory male rake and a silly ‘whimsical’ romance reader, both of whom are to prove dangerous to her later in the story. The latter, Miss Woodby, swiftly dubs Henrietta ‘Clelia’ to her ‘Celinda’ and recommends her to lodgings with a respectable milliner in London; in error, Henrietta is delivered to the door of the disreputable Mrs Eccles rather than that of the exemplary Mrs Egret.

The measure of Mrs Eccles's unsuitability is revealed in the milliner landlady’s collection of ‘novels and plays’, among which Henrietta finally lights on a copy of Joseph Andrews ‘one of the most exquisite pieces of humour in our language’ having rejected Delarivier Manley's New Atalantis and a collection of ‘Novels’ by Eliza Haywood, these last warmly recommended by Mrs Eccles as the ‘finest love-sick, passionate stories’. From its opening scenes, then, Henrietta sets its moral compass according to the contemporary scene of narrative prose fiction: Miss Woodby's addiction to the seventeenth-century French romance indicates her Quixotic cast of mind, Mrs Eccles to Eliza Haywood her dissolute one, and Henrietta's fondness for Joseph Andrews her powers of aesthetic discrimination regardless of her ignorance of the world. This early allusion to Henry Fielding's exquisite humour also indicates the kind of style and authorial presence that the author of Henrietta sought to emulate.