What are we to make of suffering? The reality of suffering is an age-old question, one that every generation’s theologians, philosophers, and artists wrestle with again and again. Jane Collier, an 18th-century English novelist, offers a novel contribution to the question of suffering in her book An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. A work of satire, the book captures the ways in which human beings torment, manipulate, and cause evil to one another.