"The hero is a kind of king-can-do-no-wrong young man; if a thing were not
right in itself he acted as if the pleasure of doing it sanctified it to
his use sufficiently. After a career of vice, in which he revels without
any sense of personal degradation, he marries an amiable girl named
Narcissa, and everyone seems to expect that such a union of vice and
virtue would be productive of the happiest consequences. In point of fact
he should have married Miss Williams, for whom he was in every respect a
suitable mate. If anything, Miss Williams was the better of the two, for
Roderick sinned in weak wantonness, while she only did so of necessity.
They repent together, but she is married to an unsavoury manservant named
Strap as a reward; while Roderick considers himself entitled to the
peerless Narcissa. Miss Williams, moreover, becomes Narcissa's
confidential friend, and the whole disgraceful arrangement is made
possible by Narcissa herself, who calmly accepts these two precious
associates at their own valuation, and admits them to the closest intimacy
without any knowledge of their true characters and early lives. The fine
flavour of real life in the book seems to me to be of the putrid kind
which some palates relish, perhaps; but it cannot be wholesome, and it may
be poisonous. The moral is: Be as vicious as you please, but prate of
virtue."

"Tom Jones" she dismissed with greater contempt, if possible:

"Another young man," she wrote, "steeped in vice, although acquainted with
virtue. He also marries a spotless heroine. Such men marrying are a danger
to the community at large. The two books taken together show well the
self-interest and injustice of men, the fatal ignorance and slavish apathy
of women; and it may be good to know these things, but it is not
agreeable."