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 ›
Long touted as the first English novel, or at the least the first epistolary novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela has since had both those positions questioned in light of work by earlier writers, most notably Aphra Behn. It remains of extreme… Read More ›
When Tobias Smollett published the last of his novels, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, he used the familiar epistolary novel form first made famous by Samuel Richardson. Five of his flat, predictable characters wrote letters that differed in their points… Read More ›
When Samuel Richardson began The History of Sir Charles Grandison, he had no plan other than to present a moral tale to counter the bawdy tone and content of Henry Fielding’s wildly popular The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling… Read More ›
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an account of the unhappy life of Evelina’s… Read More ›
Anthony Trollope produced the best-selling novel of its time in this, the third book in his Barsetshire sequence, Doctor Thorne, published in three volumes. He departed from his normal village setting in this novel to consider county characters, focusing on… Read More ›
Samuel Richardson published his second novel in seven volumes, the first two in 1747, and the remaining five the next year. Like his first work, Pamela (1740), Clarissa is an epistolary novel, made up of letters written between characters. While… Read More ›
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