Ophelia de Vere

  The history of the English novel is often told through a familiar male genealogy: Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and then Jane Austen as the great technical finisher of the early realist tradition. Yet this account leaves a significant blind spot. Long before Austen’s novels appeared in print, women writers had already shaped prose fiction through romance, epistolary narrative, sentimental fiction, educational writing, Gothic romance, regional fiction, and the novel of manners. These women, who are commonly referred to as 'professional' in their literary lives (Peterson, 2009), did not merely occupy the margins of literary history. They helped create alternative traditions that expanded the formal, thematic, and social possibilities of the novel. Aphra Behn and the Question of Origins Virginia Woolf famously drew attention to this hidden lineage in A Room of One’s Own when she described Aphra Behn as a crucial predecessor for later women writers. Behn mattered not simply becau...