The recent surge of interest in Thomas Percy as the first European ‘translator’ of a full-length Chinese novel, Hau Kiou Choaan; or, The Pleasing History (1761), has underscored important links between his early sinology and his achievements as a literary editor and historian. As critics have pointed out, before establishing literary fame as the editor of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the ballad collection that has been described as ‘the seminal, epoch-making work of English Romanticism’, Percy published two multi-volume books on Chinese culture: Hau Kiou Choaan (1761) and Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese (1762). When examined together with Reliques, these books show that Percy’s interest in China played a formative role in his ‘production of eighteenthcentury British aesthetic culture’, recovery of ‘Gothic genius’, ‘theorization of a non-classical, alternative English antiquity’, and forging of ‘a nascent British Romantic sinology’.3 This essay will not attempt to retrace these arguments. Instead, it will take up a text that has received very little attention until now: Percy's book The Matrons (1762), a collection of six short tales about widows drawn from various historical periods and civilizations around the world.

It is not difficult to guess why The Matrons ‘sank without a trace’ when it was published, as Nick Groom puts it, or why it has failed to attract critical scrutiny to this day. The six ‘matrons’ in question – ‘The Ephesian Matron’, ‘The Chinese Matron’, ‘The French Matron’, ‘The British Matron’, ‘The Turkish Matron’, and ‘The Roman Matron’, in this order – are collected together in a highly haphazard way. Percy's justification of his collection is deliberately, but not always convincingly, casual. ‘Having met with half a dozen pleasant stories on the same subject,’ he writes, ‘the Editor has here thrown them together – with the primary intention of enlivening a dull or vacant hour.’ As Percy himself is acutely aware, the logic of his collection is deeply problematic. By implicitly arguing that widows all over the world, and from all ages of history, share a common ‘levity or wantonness’, Percy's The Matrons appears to advance a thesis that is both sweepingly universalistic and shamelessly misogynistic.