The Rise Of The English Novel And Early Women Novelists

The novel is an important and popular literary genre throughout the world. But we no longer know that, at its inception, it was regarded as an inferior genre in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century in Britain. Then, only a very small percentage of writers were committed to writing novels, and even novel reading was deemed pernicious and scandalous in its beginning period.In this period, a large percentage of novelists and novel readers were women. These early women writers broke the patriarchal social restraints on their sex and started their literary creation of novels. Their works gained considerable popularity among readers of their time. Therefore, they contributed a lot to the development of the new genre, but their efforts had been excluded and neglected for a long time. Conventionally, literary critics attributed the rise of the novel completely to male writers like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. Few nineteenth-century women writers like Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot were acknowledged but only as the followers of their male counterparts. With the development of feminist literary criticism, more and more women writers before Jane Austen have been rediscovered and reevaluated.This thesis aims to study Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Eliza Haywood, Penelope Aubin, Mary Davys, and Jane Barker as representatives of the early women writers. By researching their self-representations as early women novelists and studying their representative literary texts, it aims to explore these early women writers' contributions to the rise of the novel and the connection between the development of the feminine consciousness and the rise of the novel. As a result, this thesis offers a historical analysis of the status of women and their literature in the literary history of the English fiction.