When, in their rather fine new novels, Tracy Chevalier and Clare Clark look back at 18th-century Britain, what jumps out at them is the likelihood of unplanned pregnancy. Well, yes, but that would apply up to the 1970s. And to a great extent, respectable social life until then was governed not by that contingency itself, but by the pervasive fear of it. The young women in these novels, though, have no such fears at all and charge to meet their fates gladly, like mares in season. Perhaps this is accurate for pre-Victorian times. It just reads a bit oddly.

In Burning Bright, Thomas Kellaway, a Dorset carpenter, comes to London with his family to work as a set builder at the first great circus, Astley’s Amphitheatre. The family find themselves living next door to the local eccentric, radical printer William Blake. Teenage Jem Kellaway and a neighbour’s daughter, Maggie, make friends with the Blakes and are treated to somewhat creaky (but charming) philosophical discussions and are eventually given copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Which, you can’t help thinking, could make their descendants an awful lot of money.

Meanwhile Jem’s dewy sister Maisie is determined to throw herself at Astley’s handsome son John, even though she knows he’s a conniving bastard who’s got half the circus girls up the duff already. This is the odd bit. Not unrealistic exactly, just odd. And as so often in women’s fiction, there is an inverse form of the fabled double standard that feminists rightly complain about. While Maisie is the innocent slave of passion, doing what comes naturally, John Astley is shown coldly and cynically planning the seduction like a stereotyped Waffen-SS officer plotting the killing of some Russian peasants just to pass the time. Still, it all makes for good melodrama, and things don’t end too badly.

The novel is a kind of juvenile fiction for adults and highly pleasing as such, with a subtle clarity of style, quirky but seldom overdrawn characters, engaging touches of domestic detail and a splendidly vital recreation of Georgian London. Chevalier may never have another hit as big as Girl with a Pearl Earring, but she probably deserves to.

Clark’s The Nature of Monsters is darker, quite gothic. Country girl Eliza, seduced, abandoned and pregnant — by a man who is astutely shown as a weak twit — finds herself packed off in disgrace to London, stage-fare paid, to be a servant to an apothecary. Her baby fails to survive, for reasons that are not at first clear. The other maid, Mary, is an amiable retard, and Eliza soon realises that the two of them are little more than prisoners. Without giving too much away, one can only say that the apothecary, Mr Black, is your actual mad scientist, bent on an evil experiment with human subjects. Clark conjures a whiff of sulphur.

The man-hating is blunter here than in Chevalier’s book, where most of the men are all right. The apothecary’s apprentice, on first meeting Eliza, smirkily swipes all the food off her plate, calls her a “sluttikin” and bites her breast, leaving a bruise. Um — is that how people behave? Eliza’s only ally, a Huguenot bookseller, lets her down treacherously. Men taunt and menace her on all sides. Well, gothic tales do have to be pretty masochistic (“The thin stuff of my nightdress clung to my shaking body”), and good men come to the rescue in the end. Sort of.

The pacing is not great, but Eliza’s old-before-her-time voice is beautifully done, and London again throbs and seethes. This time, the South Sea Bubble is going up in the background, to remind us that, whatever else changes from age to age, humans have always been basically nuts.

BURNING BRIGHT by Tracy Chevalier, HarperCollins £15.99

THE NATURE OF MONSTERS by Clare Clark, Viking £16.99

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices of £14.39 (Chevalier) and £15.29 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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