greatest change was to have her his equal too in birth—by revising the story to reveal her parents as reduced gentlefolks. In the end Richardson revised and released fourteen editions of Pamela, the last of which was published in 1801 after his death. In consideration of authorial intent, some believe that Pamela was a latent fetishization of Richardson's own fantasies and beliefs regarding women in society. Even though Richardson did openly revise Pamela multiple times, the justification of male aggression in a "loving" domestic relationship, as evidenced between Pamela and Mr. B, remains controversial to this day. Original sources A publication, Memoirs of Lady H, the Celebrated Pamela (1741), claims that the inspiration for Richardson's Pamela was the marriage of a coachman's daughter, Hannah Sturges, to the baronet, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, in 1725. Samuel Richardson claimed that the story was based on a true incident related to him by a friend about 25 years before, but did not identify the principals. Prof Hubert McDermott has posited Vertue Rewarded, a 1693 Irish novel by an unknown author, as a possible influence – the two books have similar plots: "a beautiful and virtuous young woman of little or no social status falls in love with a prince or libertine who is equally besotted but whose wealth, rank and ambition make him desire only to seduce and debauch the chaste heroine, without having to marry her." Also, the title "virtue rewarded" is not found in any other work of the period. Shirin and Pamela Pamela has significant similarities to the famous Persian tragic romance of Khosrow and Shirin by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. In both tales a rich, famous, and hedonistic man is trying to seduce the main female character of the story. Even though the female character is truly in love with the male counterpart, she resists his seductions and requests marriage. At the end the male character gives in to marrying the woman he loves and this love causes a gradual and positive change in the male character. The moral of both stories is the triumph of patience, virtue and modesty over despotism and hedonism. Feminism in Pamela Some believe that Richardson was one of the first male writers to take a feminist view while writing a novel. Pamela has been described as being a feminist piece of literature because it rejects traditional views of women and supports the new