Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In The Long Rise of the British Novel, 1660–1800, Nicholas Hudson offers a fresh interpretation of how the novel in Britain evolved from the Civil War to the end of the eighteenth century. Tracing the evolution of the novel decade by decade over the entirety of this period, Hudson highlights commentary about the novel in literary journals and other sources in the eighteenth century. He locates the origins of the realist novel in counter-romance works of the period after 1660, contending that the true founder of the modern realist novel was Frances Burney, particularly in Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796). Burney’s achievement was to combine the subjectivity of Samuel Richardson with the social purview of Henry Fielding, creating a fictional style that set individuals in a fully imagined social context. Heralded by her contemporaries as founding a “new era” in novel writing, Burney’s only acknowledged peer was Charlotte Smith, who was widely admired during her career as Burney’s co-creator of “the new species of writing.” This study attempts to restore the achievements of these novelists who suffered from the “great forgetting” of novels by women during the nineteenth century. The book concludes with a discussion of how the techniques of the realist novel, as pioneered in the late eighteenth century, were carried on by major novelists from the Victorian period to the present.</jats:p>