As the Enlightenment period brought new ways of thinking and an interest in reason; fantastic and religious ideas were eliminated. With the end of the century and the return to the throne of James II, the theater began to flourish again, women writers emerged, religion and morality returned to the foreground (Todd 36, Richetti). Although the pendulum has swung away from the Enlightenment, the craving for reality-based material has continued to be important, but the line between reality and fiction is normally indecipherable (Richetti). People of the Restoration period craved gossip and “factual” history they could sink their teeth into just as we now have TV, newspapers, etc. to give us our dose of fact and fiction combined (Todd 32, Richetti 6). John Richetti in the Cambridge Companion says: “Indeed, the novel, the narrative institution, which ultimately emerges from this rich confusion is a consequence of the norms of that intellectual development which we call the Enlightenment, for with its rigorous establishment of a categorical model and absolute difference between fiction and reality, the new novel is a way of regulating and realigning those perhaps naturally interpenetrating spheres" (Richetti 2) with the comings and goings of the Enlightenment we retain the need for a substance marked by truth, but there is there's still a need for some fantasy with larger than life characters grappling with good and evil and a provocative plot that can at least be stretched to possibly be true. With the possibility of discovering scandalous things about the people present in the stories; there had to be some qualifications about how learning this "true" story can also be educational and for the moral well-being of the people reading because... middle of the paper... consequence and discouragement of "bad" actions. Just like everyone tabloids claim their gossip is true today and we devour this information, the 18th century novel had much the same effect when readers were told this information was true. In addition to receiving a "moral" lesson, readers could enjoy a story that felt private and scandalous to get their dose of drama in a realistic setting. Pamela and Fantomina are both examples of the emergence of the fusion of fact and fiction to create a more dynamic, interesting, reality-based story that remains within the constraints and demands of the time that continues to thrive today. Works Cited: The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 Todd, Janet. The sign of Angelica. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.