Fanny Burney's diaries and the reading lists to be found in her unpublished notebooks and memorandum books yield many references to the courtesy writers and to the courtesy books and allied works widely read in her age. The date of Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, often taken as the culminating point in studies of the courtesy literature for men, marks the beginning of an accelerated production of courtesy books for women. In 1759 Thomas Marriott, the author of Female Conduct, was rejoicing that “such an agreeable Theme” should have been so long reserved for him. As far as he could remember, “very few [had] touched this Subject in Prose, and None in Verse” to any appreciable length before him, so that he was able to appropriate, as he thought, an uncultivated “Spot of Ground in Parnassus.”1 In the following decades, however, the problem of the conduct of the young lady was investigated so thoroughly that the lifetime of Fanny Burney, or more accurately the years 1760–1820, which saw also the rise of the novel of manners, might be called the age of courtesy books for women.