could claim to describe "all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour". She would for example casually compare a flower in a new cap she got to the white feather described by Harriet Byron as being in hers. Nevertheless, throughout her life she also subjected Grandison to much affectionate, even satirical mockery - adapting it into a dramatic lampoon (not published until 1980) around 1800. Her juvenilia also included a heroine who guyed Harriet Byron's frequent fainting, through being "in such a hurry to have a succession of fainting fits, that she had scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another". As late as 1813, she would respond to a long letter from her sister Cassandra by exclaiming "Dear me!...Like Harriet Byron I ask, what am I to do with my Gratitude". Later critics believed that it is possible that Richardson's work failed because the story deals with a "good man" instead of a "rake", which prompted Richardson's biographers Thomas Eaves and Ben Kimpel to claim, this "might account for the rather uneasy relationship between the story of the novel and the character of its hero, who is never credible in his double love – or in any love." Flynn agrees that this possibility is an "attractive one", and conditions it to say that "it is at least certain that the deadly weighted character of Sir Charles stifles the dramatic action of the book." John Mullan suggests that the problem stems from Grandison's role as a hero when he says, "his hero is able to display his virtue in action; as a consequence, Sir Charles Grandison presents its protagonist without the minutely analyzed reflexes of emotion that brought his heroines to life." Some critics, such as Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Margaret Doody, like the novel and emphasise the importance of the moral themes that Richardson takes up. In a 1987 article, Kinkead-Weekes admits that the "novel fails at the [moral] crisis" and "it must be doubtful whether it could hope for much life in the concluding volumes". However, critics such as Jean Howard Hagstrum believe that "Richardson's last novel is considerably better than can be easily imagined by those who have only heard about it. But admittedly it represents a falling off after Clarissa". Morris Golden simply claims that the novel is a book for old men. References Notes In Anthony Trollope's novel The