English novel
The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. However, given the nature of the subject, this guideline has been applied with common sense, and reference is made to novels in other languages or novelists who are not primarily British, where appropriate.
Early novels in English
Historically, the English novel has generally been seen as beginning with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, though modern scholarship cites Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko as more likely contenders, while earlier works such as Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and even the "Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have been suggested. Another important early novel is Gulliver's Travels, by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, which is both a satire of human nature, as well as a parody of travellers' tales like Robinson Crusoe. The rise of the novel as an important literary genre is generally associated with the growth of the middle class in England.Other major 18th-century English novelists are Samuel Richardson, author of the epistolary novels Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded and Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady ; Henry Fielding, who wrote Joseph Andrews and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling ; Laurence Sterne, who published Tristram Shandy in parts between 1759 and 1767; Oliver Goldsmith, author of The Vicar of Wakefield ; Tobias Smollett, a Scottish novelist best known for his comic picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, who influenced Charles Dickens; and Fanny Burney, whose novels "were enjoyed and admired by Jane Austen," wrote Evelina, Cecilia and Camilla.
A noteworthy aspect of both the 18th- and 19th- century novel is the way the novelist directly addressed the reader. For example, the author might interrupt his or her narrative to pass judgment on a character, or pity or praise another, and inform or remind the reader of some other relevant issue.
Romantic period
The phrase 'Romantic novel' has several possible meanings. Here it refers to novels written during the Romantic era in literary history, which runs from the late 18th century until the beginning of the Victorian era in 1837. But to complicate matters there are novels written in the romance tradition by novelists like Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Meredith. In addition the phrase today is mostly used to refer to the popular pulp-fiction genre that focusses on romantic love. The Romantic period is especially associated with the poets William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats, though two major novelists, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, also published in the early 19th century.Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, invented the Gothic fiction genre. The word gothic was originally used in the sense of medieval. This genre combines "the macabre, fantastic, and supernatural" and usually involves haunted castles, graveyards and various picturesque elements. Later novelist Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the Gothic villain which developed into the Byronic hero. Her most popular and influential work, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is frequently described as the archetypal Gothic novel. Vathek, by William Beckford, and The Monk, by Matthew Lewis, were further notable early works in both the Gothic and horror genres.
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, as another important Gothic novel as well as being an early example of science fiction.
The vampire genre fiction began with John William Polidori's The Vampyre. This short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour. An important later work is Varney the Vampire, where many standard vampire conventions originated: Varney has fangs, leaves two puncture wounds on the neck of his victims, and has hypnotic powers and superhuman strength. Varney was also the first example of the "sympathetic vampire", who loathes his condition but is a slave to it.
Among more minor novelists in this period Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock are worthy of comment. Edgeworth's novel Castle Rackrent is "the first fully developed regional novel in English" as well as "the first true historical novel in English" and an important influence on Walter Scott. Peacock was primarily a satirist in novels such as Nightmare Abbey and The Misfortunes of Elphin.
Jane Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism. Her plots, though fundamentally comic, highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She reveals not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become accepted as a major writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture. Austen's works include Pride and Prejudice ''Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Emma.
The other major novelist at the beginning of the early 19th century was Sir Walter Scott, who was not only a highly successful British novelist but "the greatest single influence on fiction in the 19th century... a European figure". Scott established the genre of the historical novel with his series of Waverley Novels, including Waverley, The Antiquary, and The Heart of Midlothian''. However, Austen is today widely read and the source for films and television series, while Scott is less often read.
Victorian novel
It was in the Victorian era that the novel became the leading literary genre in English. A number of women novelists were successful in the 19th century, although they often had to use a masculine pseudonym. At the beginning of the 19th century most novels were published in three volumes. However, monthly serialization was revived with the publication of Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers in twenty parts between April 1836 and November 1837. Demand was high for each episode to introduce some new element, whether it was a plot twist or a new character, so as to maintain the readers' interest. Both Dickens and Thackeray frequently published this way.In the 1830s and '40s, novelists began to show the influence of social critics on their work, especially Thomas Carlyle, who raised the "Condition-of-England Question" to describe "the social and political upheavals which followed the Reform Act of 1832". In response, novelists wrote "Condition of England novels", which were in many ways a reaction to rapid industrialization, and the social, political and economic issues associated with it, and were a means of commenting on abuses of government and industry and the suffering of the poor, who were not profiting from England's economic prosperity. Stories of the working-class poor were directed toward the middle class to help create sympathy and promote change. An early example is Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.
Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s with the two novels already mentioned. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion, accessible to readers of all classes. One of his most popular works to this day is A Christmas Carol. In more recent years Dickens has been most admired for his later novels, such as Dombey and Son, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend. An early rival to Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray, who during the Victorian period ranked second only to him, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair. In that novel he satirizes whole swaths of humanity while retaining a light touch. It features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp.
The Brontë sisters were other significant novelists in the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted as classics. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each the following year: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey. Later, Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Charlotte's Villette were published. Elizabeth Gaskell was also a successful writer and her first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. Gaskell's North and South contrasts the lifestyle in the industrial north of England with the wealthier south. Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions, Gaskell usually frames her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes: her early works focused on factory work in the Midlands. She always emphasised the role of women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters.
Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful, prolific, and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works are set in the imaginary county of Barsetshire, including The Warden and Barchester Towers. He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters, including The Way with Live Now. Trollope's novels portrayed the lives of the landowning and professional classes of early Victorian England.
George Eliot's , are important examples of literary realism, and are admired for their combination of high Victorian literary detail combined with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow geographic confines they often depict.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside is seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy. A Victorian realist, in the tradition of George Eliot, he was also influenced both in his novels and poetry by Romanticism, especially by William Wordsworth. Charles Darwin is another important influence on Thomas Hardy. Like Charles Dickens he was also highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898, so that initially he gained fame as the author of such novels as, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. He ceased writing novels following adverse criticism of this last novel. In novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hardy attempts to create modern works in the genre of tragedy, that are modelled on the Greek drama, especially Aeschylus and Sophocles, though in prose, not poetry, a novel not drama, and with characters of low social standing, not nobility. Another significant late 19th-century novelist is George Gissing who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. His best known novel is New Grub Street.
Important developments occurred in genre fiction in this era. Although pre-dated by John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River in 1841, the history of the modern fantasy genre is generally said to begin with George MacDonald, the influential author of The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes. William Morris was a popular English poet who also wrote several fantasy novels during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Moonstone, is generally considered the first detective novel in the English language, while The Woman in White is regarded as one of the finest sensation novels. H. G. Wells's writing career began in the 1890s with science fiction novels like The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds which describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians. Wells is seen, along with Frenchman Jules Verne, as inventing the scientific romance. He also wrote realistic fiction about the lower middle class in novels such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly.