In the eighteenth century, emergent genres took as their province the problematic relation of the inward and private to the social and public. As this book has argued, among the novel's strategies for the mediating of these spheres was a plotting of women's relation to property through reference to two classically sanctioned and masculine modes, pastoral and georgic. Through this conjunction of the marginal and interiorized with the elite and hegemonic, the novel is able to render self-making an issue of cultural moment. A fuller understanding of the conditions informing early fiction's representations of identity can be realized through comparison with an established genre, such as historiography. Historiography, while clearly enjoying an authority and prestige denied the novel, nevertheless reveals in its accommodation of sentimental impulse to political narrative a susceptibility to comparable pressures. These discrete, internal adjustments also have an external dimension, apparent in the responsiveness of each genre to the narrative challenges posed by the other: novel and historiography reciprocally incorporate many of the distinctive features of the competing form, even as both lay title to bordering genres such as memoir and biography. Questions of audience are, of course, central to this process of mutual re-definition throughout the period. But, as Part IV has argued, in the closing decade of the century, the need to secure readers is both intensified and complicated by the pervasive tendency to formulate generic issues through reference to gender.