Women Writers and the Rise of the Novel

Abstract

The traditional narrative of the English novel in the eighteenth century holds that its origins were male, however much writers such as Jane Austen, Frances Burney, and Charlotte Smith came to dominate the genre. More specifically, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson, the triumvirate proposed in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), created the works that founded the realist English novel. And yet such a paradigm occludes the rich tradition of early fiction by women, not only the works of Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, but also those by novelists active in the 1720s: Eliza Haywood, Penelope Aubin, Mary Davys, and Elizabeth Rowe. The latter pared the seduction plot away from the political focus of Behn and Manley to focus their texts on a woman’s response to sexual experience and betrayal — and were thus particularly relevant to the work of Richardson. He may have claimed to his friend Aaron Hill in 1741 that he offered a ‘new species of writing’, and avowed himself ignorant of previous fictional trends, but the work of 1720s female authors reverberated vividly in his novels.¹

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