Written in epistolary form just as this was reaching its height of popularity, "Evelina" portrays the English upper middle class through a 17-year-old woman who has reached marriageable age. It was a Bildungsroman ahead of its time. "Evelina" pushed boundaries, for female protagonists were still "relatively rare" in that genre. Comic and witty, it is ultimately a satire of the oppressive masculine values that shaped a young woman's life in the 18th century, and of other forms of social hypocrisy. "Encyclopædia Britannica" calls it a "landmark in the development of the novel of manners".