The work of these five giants was accompanied by interesting experiments from a
 number of lesser novelists. Sarah Fielding, for instance, Henry's sister, wrote
 penetratingly and gravely about friendship in The Adventures of David Simple (1744,
 with a sequel in 1753). Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote (1752) and Richard
 Graves in The Spiritual Quixote (1773) responded inventively to the influence of
 Cervantes, also discernible in the writing of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. John
 Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (known as Fanny Hill; 1748-49) chose a more
 contentious path; in his charting of a young girl's sexual initiation, he experiments with
 minutely detailed ways of describing the physiology of intercourse. In emphatic
 contrast, Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) offers an extremist, and rarefied,
 version of the sentimental hero, while Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765)
 somewhat laboriously initiated the vogue for Gothic fiction. William Beckford's Vathek
 (1786), Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Lewis' Monk (1796)
 are among the more distinctive of its successors. But the most engaging and
 thoughtful minor novelist of the period is Fanny Burney, who was also an evocative
 and self-revelatory diarist and letter writer. Her Evelina (1778) and Camilla (1796) in
 particular handle with independence of invention and emotional insight the theme of a
 young woman negotiating her first encounters with a dangerous social world.