[1] In this 3-volume epistolary novel, title character Evelina is the unacknowledged but legitimate daughter of a dissipated English aristocrat, and thus raised in rural seclusion until her 17th year.

Through a series of humorous events that take place in London and the resort town of Hotwells, near Bristol, Evelina learns to navigate the complex layers of 18th-century English society and come under the eye of a distinguished nobleman with whom a romantic relationship is formed in the latter part of the novel.

Reverend Villars fears Mme Duval's influence could lead Evelina to a fate similar to that of her mother Caroline, who secretly wedded Sir John Belmont, a libertine, who afterwards denied the marriage.

Ignorant of the conventions and behaviours of 18th-century London society, she makes a series of humiliating (but humorous) faux pas that further expose her to social ridicule.

She soon earns the attentions of two gentlemen: Lord Orville, a handsome and extremely eligible peer and pattern-card of modest, becoming behaviour; and Sir Clement Willoughby, a baronet with duplicitous intentions.

A second compromise sees Evelina return to London with her grandmother, where she is forced to spend time with her ill-bred Branghton cousins and their rowdy friends, but she is distracted by Mr. Macartney, a melancholy and direly-poor Scottish poet.

Otherwise, her time with the Branghtons is uniformly mortifying: during her visit to the Marylebone pleasure garden, for instance, she is attacked by a drunken sailor and accosted by several rowdy men before being rescued by prostitutes—and in this humiliating company, she meets Lord Orville again.

When an insulting and brash letter supposedly from Lord Orville devastates her and makes her believe she misperceived him, she returns home to Berry Hill and falls ill.

Aware of Lord Orville's arrival, Evelina tries to distance herself from him because of his impertinent letter, but his gentle manners work their spell until she is torn between attraction to him and belief in his past duplicity.

They are married in a joint ceremony alongside Evelina and Lord Orville, who decide to visit Reverend Villars at Berry Hill for their honeymoon trip.