Daniel Defoe claims in his preface to the novel fully titled The Fortunate Mistress; or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Call’d the Countess de Wintselshiem, in Germany. Being the Person… Read More ›
When William Harrison Ainsworth wrote Rookwood, he was struggling against a recent bankruptcy of the business he shared with his father-in-law. Returning to the practice of law in 1830 and anticipating the birth of his third daughter, according to biographer… Read More ›
Tobias Smollett’s first novel reflected both the reading interests of the day and Smollett’s own attitude toward fiction. As a picaresque with first-person narration, the novel offered readers an action-centered story with a rogue main character, but Roderick Random could… Read More ›
Roderick Hudson was Henry James’s first extensive novel, appearing as installments in 1875 in The Atlantic Monthly. James chose as protagonist an amateur American sculptor, placing him in Europe with a wealthy patron named Rowland Mallet. Critics agreed that this… Read More ›
A Robin Hood figure, the factual individual named Rob Roy, formed the basis for Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction Rob Roy. The real Rob Roy (literally “Red Robert,” for his red hair) was a drover who became an outlaw, leading… Read More ›
Arguably the first English novel, Daniel Defoe’s prose romance Robinson Crusoe recounts the fictional adventures of the title character, an ambitious Englishman, through Crusoe’s first-person autobiographical narrative. In the formally titled The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,… Read More ›
An author with an avid interest in history, especially that of Italy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton focused his historical fiction, Rienzi: The Last of the Tribunes, on a real-life figure named Cola di Rienzo. He proves an idealist who brings peace to… Read More ›
George Meredith’s fourth novel, Rhoda Fleming, dealt with a familiar theme: the pressure society places on both genders—but especially women—to conform to unrealistic expectations. That his culture governed love relationships with laws, such as those relating to marriage and divorce,… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native moves at a slow pace that drives some readers to distraction. His narrative pace mirrors that of country life, very much a topic in his novel, featured in his setting of Egdon Heath…. Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott has long been acknowledged as the first writer of historical fiction, and when he chose Scotland as a setting, he generally produced his best work. He introduced this approach in his first novel, Waverley (1814), when he… Read More ›
First serialized in Temple Bar in 1880, Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Rebel of the Family has enjoyed renewed interest in the 21st century due to the efforts of feminist critics who have focused on the novel’s several controversial issues. While… Read More ›
Most critics note that Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia is as much essay, parable, and cautionary tale as novel. Johnson sought to counter the popular optimistic philosophy supported by the French Rousseau and German Leibnitz, which held… Read More ›
The quest story has existed for centuries, with Homer’s The Odyssey serving as the prototypical example. Also known as the hero’s journey, plot aspects of the quest often appear in the modern English-language romance novel and may be identified in… Read More ›
Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward was one of three novels Scott issued in 1823. The first edition was printed in 10,000 copies, the sheets carried in bales by steamship to London on May 16, 1823, where binders worked the night… Read More ›
Founded in 1809 by John Murray of the powerful publishing house of the same name, as a Tory rival to the Whig periodical The Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review was distinguished through association with Sir Walter Scott, among others. Many… Read More ›
John Galt had written four Scottish regional stories for William Blackwood’s Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine before he published his fifth, The Provost, in that journal. The series boosted Galt’s reputation beyond that of a writer of biographies, articles, travel books, and… Read More ›
Although written in 1846, Charlotte Brontë’s first novel, The Professor, would not be published until after her 1855 death. Clearly autobiographical, it served as a model for her later, more fully developed version of her experiences in Brussels as a… Read More ›
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, long acknowledged as the best of the many works by James Hogg (1770–1835), focuses on the religious and political conflict in Scotland at the end of the 18th century. The first portion,… Read More ›
Of Anthony Hope’s many short stories and various novels, The Prisoner of Zenda remains his best known and enjoyed, praised by contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson, followed by its less successful sequel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898). The novel offers… Read More ›
Henry James first published The Princess Casamassima as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly between September 1885 and October 1886. He reintroduces the princess as a character from a previous novel, Roderick Hudson (1875), in which the sculptor Hudson dies in… Read More ›
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