The Rise of the Novel
C. Knight
Some Eighteenth-Century Novels
(Novels with asterisks are described in some detail below.)
1665-71. Richard Head, The English Rogue
1678-84. John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress*
1688. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko*
1692. William Congreve, Incognita
1709. Mary Delarivière Manley, The New Atalantis
1719. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe*
Eliza Heywood, Love in Excess; or the Fatal Enquiry, A
Novel
1720. Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton
W. P., The Jamaica Lady
1722. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year*
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders*
Daniel Defoe, Colonel Jacque
1723. Arthur Blackamore, Luck at Last
1724. Daniel Defoe, The Fortunate Mistress (Roxana)*
1727. Mary Davys, The Accomplished Rake
Eliza Heywood, Philidore and Placentia
1740. Samuel Richardson, Pamela*
1741. Henry Fielding, Shamela
1742. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews*
1743. Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild
1744. Sarah Fielding, David Simple*
1747-48. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
1748. Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random*
1749. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
John Cleland, Fanny Hill
1751. Henry Fielding, Amelia*
Tobias Smollett, Peregrine Pickle*
Eliza Heywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless
Francis Coventry, Pompey the Little*
1752. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote*
1753. Tobias Smollett, Ferdinand Count Fathom
1753-54. Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison
1756-66. Thomas Amory, John Buncle
1759. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas*
1759-67. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
1760-65. Charles Johnstone, Chrysal
1760-62. Tobias Smollett, Sir Launcelot Greaves
1761. Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph*
1762. John Leland, Longsword; Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall*
1764. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto*
1766. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield*
1766-70. Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality
1768. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey*
1769. Elizabeth Griffith, The Delicate Distress
1771. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling*
Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker*
1773. Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote
1777. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron
1778. Fanny Burney, Evelina
1782. Fanny Burney, Cecilia
1783-89. Thomas Day, Sandford and Merton
1785. Sophia Lee, The Recess
Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (Criticism)
1786. William Beckford, Vathek*
1788. Charlotte Smith, Emmeline
1790. Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance
1791. Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest*
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story*
1792. Thomas Holcroft, Anna St. Ives*
1793. Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House
1794. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho*
William Godwin, Caleb Williams
1794-97. Thomas Holcroft, Hugh Trevor
1796. Matthew Lewis, The Monk*
Robert Bage, Hermsprong*
Fanny Burney, Camilla
Elisabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art
1797. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian*
1798. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Women
1799. William Godwin, Travels of St. Leon
1800. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent*
1801. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda
Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter
1804. Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray
1806. Sydney Owenson, The Wild Irish Girl
1811. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility*
1812. Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee (in Tales of Fashionable Life)
1813. Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice*
1814. Walter Scott, Waverley*
Jane Austin, Mansfield Park*
1815. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering*
1816. Jane Austin, Emma*
Walter Scott, The Antiquary
Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall*
Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon
1817. Walter Scott, Old Mortality*
Walter Scott, Rob Roy
1818. Jane Austin, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion*
Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian*
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey*
Susan Ferrier, Marriage*
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
1819. Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor*
1820. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
1821. Walter Scott, Kenilworth
John Galt, Annals of the Parish
1822. John Galt, The Provost
Thomas Love Peacock, Maid Marian
1823. Walter Scott, Quentin Durward
1824. James Hogg, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner*
Walter Scott, Redgauntlet*
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. [The tribulations and perhaps partial triumphs of a level-headed woman and her romantic sister, both of genteel education but limited means, who
have really or apparently been abandoned by the men they love, in Austen's first
published novel.]
---. Pride and Prejudice. [Austen's second novel combines contrasting sisters--one witty and aggressive, the other passive and beautiful--with sharp social observation and satire and with similarly contrasting men.. Perhaps Austen's most popular novel, but it lacks the depth of the last three.]
---. Mansfield Park. [Fanny Price, a poor relation living with a wealthy family, observes their moral failings and those of society around them, while wondering whether her inherent goodness will ever win the attention of the man she loves. Austen's most ordinary heroine and most serious novel.]
---. Emma. [Considered by many to be Austen's finest novel, Emma is her most thorough exploration of the relationships of class and moral behavior and contains her most complex heroine--beautiful, wealthy, and charming, but deluded and self-centered.]
--. Persuasion. [A sensitive and aware woman, shy and ill at ease in her superficial family, wonders if she can recapture the attention and heart of a worthy man she rejected years ago. Austen's keen social observation combines with an autumnal richness that makes the ending even sweeter.]
Bage, Robert. Hermsprong. [The central character is a man raised in America with a strong sense of natural goodness, who takes on the English social system to win the heroine. An allegory of radical politics.]
Beckford, William. Vathek. [A notable eccentric himself, Beckford wrote (originally in French) an eastern tale about a proto-Byronic character and the various forces, usually diabolic, that he invokes. Self-consciously and perhaps comically melodramatic.]
Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. [Behn's possibly semi-autobiography tale of a slave revolt raises issues concerning slavery, colonialism, and natural heroism.]
Bunyan, John. Pilgrim's Progress. [Christian's allegorical journey to salvation provides an opportunity to discuss the relationship between the novel and non-novelistic narrative.]
Coventry, Francis. Pompey the Little. [One of several novels about non-human central characters, this one tells the story of a dog in the style of Fielding.]
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. [Crusoe's survival on an isolated island involves both personal resourcefulness and issues of religion, class, politics, and morality.]
---. Journal of the Plague Year. [H.D.'s harrowing yet meticulous account of the London plague of 1665 was long thought non-fictional and provides another example of fiction on the margins of the novel.]
---. The Fortunate Mistress (Roxana). [The memoirs of a journey from bourgeois wife to royal mistress and back involve darker and more serious crimes than those of Moll Flanders, with whom she can be usefully compared.]
--. Moll Flanders. [An orphan maneuvers her way, in the first half of the novel, through five marriages (one of them to her brother), and, in the second half, through many years as a successful thief; Moll is partly a mythic survivor, partly an exemplary penitent, and partly an ironic figure.]
Edgeworth, Maria. Castle Rackrent. [The decline of a family of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy is traced through several generations. The eccentric Irish are set against the decadent English in the first important regional novel.]
Ferrier, Susan. Marriage. [A fashionable young lady marries a Scottish laird and has to deal with his uncouth family, but neither Scottish boorishness nor English shallowness escapes her satiric eye.]
Fielding, Henry. Amelia. [Fielding's last and least popular novel tells the story of a virtuous wife and her flawed husband caught in a web of social forces and anticipates the novels of Dickens and Thackeray.]
---. Joseph Andrews. [Beginning as a parody of Richardson's Pamela, Joseph Andrews takes on a richly comic life of its own, as a virtuous and manly servant pursues his sweetheart with the help of a good-hearted but bumbling parson.]
Fielding, Sarah. The Adventures of David Simple. [Henry Fielding's sister was also a friend of Richardson, and her first novel is a combination of Fielding's comedy with Richardson's moral sensibility.]
Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield. [A humble and ironic parson tells the story of his family's pastoral life and severe distresses; either an ironic parody of the sentimental novel or the fictional equivalent of Job, depending on which critic you read.]
Hogg, James. Confessions of a Justified Sinner. [A Scottish version of the gothic, featuring power, puritanism, and diabolic possession. Its strong sense of locality gives it particular impact.]
Holcroft, Thomas. Anna St. Ives. [A novel with radical political implications that sets a resourceful and brave young man against society and her family for the love of an intelligent and strong young woman.]
Inchbold, Elizabeth. A Simple Story. [Despite its title, a rather complex telling of the quandary of a young woman caught among love, family, and disastrous marriage.]
Johnson, Samuel. Rasselas. [An eastern fable in which a prince seeks (unsuccessfully) to make "the choice of life"; with the help of his sister and a philosophical poet he canvasses human existence in an important example of the philosophical tale.]
Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote. [A rich and attractive young woman is misled by her extensive reading of French romances and discovers what love and virtue are in the real world, a quest that mixes comedy with sentiment.]
Lewis, Matthew G. The Monk. [Perhaps the most sensational of the horrid tales, combining the self-conscious excesses of Vathek with gothic terror. Includes most of the clichés of the genre: seduction, rape, murder, evil monks, bleeding nuns, wild interpolated stories, guilty consciences, conscious innocence, exotic settings, and divine retribution.]
Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. [Fragments of a manuscript left after it has been used as gun-wadding tell the story of a highly sensitive man who seeks to do good in an evil world. The sentimental novel to end all sentimental novels; it didn't.]
Peacock, Thomas Love. Headlong Hall. [Romantic Menippean satire. Short on plot and long on dialogue; eccentric characters, especially philosophers, gather for funny talk.]
---. Nightmare Abbey. [Following the pattern Headlong Hall, with somewhat more plot. Includes comic versions of Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, and satirizes the gothic novel.]
Radcliffe, Ann. The Romance of the Forest. [All of Radcliffe's novels are gothic tales of a young woman, separated from her supporting family, subjected to incredible but (as it turns out) not supernatural terrors at the hands of a sinister and dominant older man, and ultimately rescued by a younger one. They are set in exotic times and settings and include picturesque natural description of places Radcliffe never saw. The Romance of the Forest is the shortest of her three major novels.]
---. The Mysteries of Udolpho. [The most popular of Radcliffe's gothic novels (highly recommended by Jane Austen characters), the most typical, and the longest.]
---. The Italian. [The Radcliffe heroine seeks to escape from a villainous monk in perhaps Radcliffe's most successful version of the gothic formula.]
Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. [A peasant but literate servant is attacked and imprisoned by her master, whom she converts and marries; her early suffering and her emergence into high society, told in letters, popularized the novel as a genre.]
Scott, Sarah. Millenium Hall. [Two (male) travelers come upon a remarkable community of women who are notable for their ordered and harmonious lives and their goodness to others; the travelers learn the stories of the lives that brought each woman to this refuge.]
Scott, Walter. Waverley. [The first of Scott's novels treats relations between feudal highlanders and moderate lowlanders during the 1745 rebellion. It establishes the pattern for Scott's novels but is less lively than some later ones.]
---. Guy Mannering. [Smuggling and inheritance in western Scotland, with a collection of interesting characters and a strong plot.]
---. Old Mortality. [Scott's treatment of the uprising of Covenanters in 1679 pits English brutality against Scottish fanaticism and traces the difficult position of moderates with loyalties to either side. Strong portraits of historical figures.]
---. The Heart of Midlothian. [The first two-thirds of the the novel, with its sharp depiction of the 1736 rioting in Edinburgh and with the powerful character of Jeanie Deans, who literally goes to great lengths to save her sister, is Scott at his best, but the ending is rather tame. Good folk portraits.]
---. The Bride of Lammermoor. [The most gothic of Scott's novels, telling an unhappy love story that involves the power of irrational forces and sets a noble member of a decaying aristocratic family against crass newcomers. Here loss predominates over progress in Scott's typical conflict.]
---. Redgauntlet. [Prince Charles returns to Britain years after the rebellion, and Scott returns to the subject and to his most characteristic themes. Both mysterious and mellow, the novel is a tour de force of narrative modes and includes powerful interpolated stories.]
Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. [Memoirs and letters tell the unhappy story of a woman who does not marry the man she loves but marries a man she respects, only to find that he betrays her. Her problem is how to act rightly in the web of deception and misperception that surrounds her.]
Smollett, Tobias. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. [A crusty uncle takes his sister, nephew and niece on a journey through England and Scotland in a novel told in letters and filled with comic characters and social observations. Smollett's masterpiece.]
---. Peregrine Pickle. [Something of a retelling of Roderick Random in the third person, with similar eccentric characters. Includes a long interpolated story of a scandalous woman.]
--. Roderick Random, [A high-born Scottish lad, through no fault of his own, is disinherited and left to face the rough-and-tumble world of high-life and low-life and life on the make in London, the navy, and on the continent, which he reports with lively caricatures and an energetic style.]
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey. [Parson Yorick's comic journey to France involves him in various relationships (sentimental or otherwise) with women, in observations on French life, and in discovering the secret of social success. Unfinished, the novel concludes with him reaching for the end.]
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. [An evil villain seeks to seduce a virtuous maiden in an atmosphere filled with mysterious supernatural events and omens. The first Gothic novel.]