English novel

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.

Historically, the English novel has generally been seen as beginning with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722),[1] though modern scholarship cites Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684) John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) as more likely contenders, while earlier works such as Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1485), and even the "Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1400) have been suggested.

Other major 18th-century English novelists are Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), author of the epistolary novels Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747–48); Henry Fielding (1707–1754), who wrote Joseph Andrews (1742) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749); Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), who published Tristram Shandy in parts between 1759 and 1767;[4] Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774), author of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766); Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), a Scottish novelist best known for his comic picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), who influenced Charles Dickens;[5] and Fanny Burney (1752–1840), whose novels "were enjoyed and admired by Jane Austen," wrote Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796).

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.

But to complicate matters there are novels written in the romance tradition by novelists like Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Meredith.

[14] 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.

In more recent years Dickens has been most admired for his later novels, such as Dombey and Son (1846–48), Great Expectations (1860–61), Bleak House (1852–53), Little Dorrit (1855–57), and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65).

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 (1847).

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.

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 (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).

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 (1858).

H. G. Wells's (1866–1946) writing career began in the 1890s with science fiction novels like The Time Machine (1895), and The War of the Worlds (1898) which describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians.

[26] Lawrence attempted to explore human emotions more deeply than his contemporaries and challenged the boundaries of the acceptable treatment of sexual issues, most notably in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was privately published in Florence in 1928.

[29] Another significant modernist in the 1920 was Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), who was an influential feminist, member of the Bloomsbury Group, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique.

[31] E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), reflected challenges to imperialism, while his earlier works, such as A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), examined the restrictions and hypocrisy of Edwardian society in England.

Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) satirised the "bright young things" of the 1920s and 1930s, notably in A Handful of Dust (1934) and Decline and Fall (1928), while Brideshead Revisited (1945) has a theological basis, setting out to examine the effect of divine grace on its main characters.

[32] Irishwoman and Bloomsbury Group member Elizabeth Bowen is known for her novels about the Irish Protestant gentry, such as The Death of the Heart (1938) and London during World War II bombing raids, The Heat of the Day (1948).

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) published his famous dystopia Brave New World in 1932, the same year as John Cowper Powys's (1872–1963) A Glastonbury Romance.

Notable for an ability to combine serious literary acclaim with broad popularity, his novels include, The Heart of the Matter (1948), A Burnt-Out Case (1961), and The Human Factor (1978).

One of the most influential novels of the immediate post-war period was William Cooper's (1910–2002) naturalistic Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), which was a conscious rejection of the modernist tradition.

[35] Other novelists writing in the 1950s and later were: Anthony Powell (1905–2000) whose twelve-volume cycle of novels A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75), is a comic examination of movements and manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural, and military life in the mid-20th century; comic novelist Kingsley Amis is best known for his academic satire Lucky Jim (1954); Nobel Prize laureate William Golding's allegorical novel Lord of the Flies (1954), explores how culture created by man fails, using as an example a group of British schoolboys marooned on a deserted island.

Anthony Burgess is especially remembered for his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), set in the not-too-distant future, which was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971.

Salman Rushdie (born 1947) is another among a number of post Second World War writers from the former British colonies who permanently settled in Britain.

[38] Scotland has in the late 20th-century produced several important novelists, including James Kelman (born 1946), who like Samuel Beckett can create humour out of the most grim situations.

[39] In 2007 she won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature;[40] Alasdair Gray (1934–2019) whose Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) is a dystopian fantasy set in his home town Glasgow.

Another contemporary Scot is Irvine Welsh, whose novel Trainspotting (1993), gives a brutal depiction of the lives of working class Edinburgh drug users.

Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers, while Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre.

Zadie Smith's (born 1975) Whitbread Book Award winning novel White Teeth (2000), mixes pathos and humour, focusing on the later lives of two war time friends in London.

[42] One of the more ambitious novelists to emerge in contemporary English literature is David Mitchell whose far-reaching novel Cloud Atlas (2004) spans from the 19th century into the future.

[45] In 2003 the BBC carried out a UK survey entitled The Big Read in order to find the "nation's best-loved novel" of all time, with works by English novelists Tolkien, Austen, Pullman, Adams and Rowling making up the top five on the list.