In the eighteenth century, as bourgeois subject culture and the novel take shape, authors grapple with the challenge of composing characters whose moral interiority is not apparent—like those of the authors’ and readers’ fellow bourgeois citizens. This inscrutability of character is at the core of Adam Smith’s hitherto unexplored definition of “character” as a “compound invisible object,” one that could be shaped rhetorically as the ethos/ἦθος of the author. The literary response to the problem of inscrutability shapes this stage of invisibility narratives: Eliza Haywood and Susanna Rowson develop the metaphor of invisibility into a literary technique to redefine the ethos of the author (Haywood) and the narrator (Rowson). By the end of the eighteenth century, the metaphor of invisibility, reflecting the profound changes in subject culture, has transitioned from early modern spectres and spirits to modern invisible characters. The composition of invisible subjects in eighteenth-century literature is an engendering whereby women authors use the narrative of invisibility to reflect upon their own position in the emerging marketplace for the novel.