I would like to begin with a tale of three Willoughbys: Sir Clement, George and John. When Fanny Burney names her rake ‘Sir Clement Willoughby’ in 1778 she may well merely intend to evoke his breeding; as Loraine Fletcher notes, ‘Willoughby’ ‘carries the necessary Burke's Peerage ring; a Willoughby fought at Agincourt’. Burney 's character is a distillation of the libertine figure familiar from Richardson and others: as Sir Hargreve Pollexfen in Sir Charles Grandison (1754) does with Harriet Byron, he pursues and abducts Evelina; like Lovelace with Clarissa he masks his sexual intentions behind protestations of love. Unlike either of them he is allowed much less success: his abduction attempt lasts only a few minutes, while his pursuit of Evelina is derailed almost from the start by her understanding of his venality. Burney uses Willoughby to embody unsatisfied desire and masculine competition over Evelina; in the end readers are unsure whether he regrets more his loss of the heroine or his loss of her to Lord Orville, his rival. Such is the lasting effect of Evelina that, when Smith calls her hero of sensibility in her 1791 novel Celestina George Willoughby, the echoes of Sir Clement are audible. But where Sir Clement is a rake, George is a man of feeling, totally devoted to his love for Celestina and totally undone by his notion that she is his half-sister and therefore unattainable. Although not a sexual predator like Sir Clement, he is nonetheless far from perfect: indecisive and vacillating, self-justifying and self-dramatizing, he agrees to a loveless marriage with his heiress cousin in order to recover his finances, suspects Celestina of duplicity on the basis of mere report and publicly shuns her, and spends much of the novel sunk in his own despair. Yet readers are invited to like Willoughby, as he is invariably called, and to sympathize with him. He is presented as embodying true romantic love, perfecting the lovelorn hero suffering under crossed stars.