Mothers of the Novel was published in 1987 with a specific polemical purpose, to re-establish the crucial role women played in the novel’s early life. What was originally supposed to be a chapter on the few progenitors to Jane Austen opened the door to whole generations of women who deserve to be better known and appreciated in the literary canon.
This strength of purpose gives the book vigour and bite but it also can make the book a little repetitive. It’s an important point to repeat, and I wouldn’t want the book to be lighter or more diplomatic, but it can get a little wearing. Writer after writer is brought up, discussed and analysed but each chapter ends with the same point, that the writer is not better known or respected because she was a woman. Some women were to scandalous to survive in the canon but some too demure, some women wrote too fast and others too slow, some wrote books that followed trends and some were too experimental, some were too political and some too domestic - whatever reason given, it boils down to the fact the writer was a woman.
This alone would have made this a powerful book but what makes it enjoyable, thrilling even, is the desire to introduce the reader to new writers and new works. It’s like being cornered by a friend who’s just got into something and wants to share it with you. The enthusiasm and glee to share all these new works and writers is what gives the joy to balance the anger.
I don’t know how much impact the book at series had when it came out, I was only two and my favourite books were Ladybird fairy stories (The Magic Porridge Pot was a banger) but I hope it made a splash. Certainly, in 2025, there has been some shift. Authors who were still a little remembered, like Aphra Behn and Fanny Burney are more central to the general, popular story of the novel. Fanny Burney even featured in a mid 2010s documentary about the birth of the novel, though she was described as the progenitor of ‘chick-lit’ and example of all women’s writing being forced into the same genre. I know that Eliza Haywood is getting much more love (as she deserves) with some of her works being figured in early novel courses… there’s some shift, but not much.
One of my overriding interests are books written in the eighteenth century (and I’m prepared to stretch into the long century when the occasion requires) and I had heard of many of the writers and read a chunk of them, but there were still authors I’d never heard of, books I’ve not tracked down. I want to find some writing by Anne Fanshawe now, I’m doubling my efforts to find Fielding and Collier’s The Cry, I’m looking forward to reading my Amelia Opie and my Eliza Fenwick. Even to an old hand like me, this book has opened up new roads to explore.
I didn’t realise Aphra Behn wrote 13 novels, I’ve only read two of them. I knew that Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World is supposed to be good but I never realised how forthright and interesting she was. I had always assumed Delreviere Manley’s New Atlantis was a simple compendium of gossip but I didn’t know she worked with Swift, that they wrote journalism and satire together. Hearing about one character in that book, a gossipy midwife called Mrs Nightwork, I can’t help but draw links with Christopher Smart’s Mary Midnight - and I look forward to reading it to see if he may have got inspiration from there.
There were so many women writers towards the end of the eighteenth century, and they were so successful, that male writers began to publish under female pen names. A newer crop of women writers in the second half of the twentieth century may have felt they were carving out something new, with women’s literary journals and prizes - but they were only recreating a network that women writers had before. Jane Austen didn’t write in a vacuum, she was part of a full literary tradition. Even thirty-odd years after this book was published, I think that tradition is largely unknown and unsung.
Spender is quite contemptous of the two main histories of the novel, Ian Watts’s The Rise of the Novel (still in print) and Walter Allen’s The English Novel - both of which I’ve got but not read yet (I want to as a soon as I find the boxes they are in though). She gives Watts a little more credit for adding some women novelists in his telling, but as supporting parts to the five big men. Allen, according to Spender’s account, doesn’t even seem to realise that women might have had something to say through history.
I don’t agree with everything Spender argues. I’m not convinced that Anne Radcliffe should be heralded as the founder of the Romantic Movement, though I have to admit ignorance about the Romantics in general. I’m also not convinced that the erasure of women should be seen as an active attack by men, that it’s more a byproduct of men getting the last word every time and not even considering women. I don’t think Walter Allen left women out of his history because of an animus to women as much as his having a huge blind spot. I hope this book has reduced a blind spot of my own, even as a try to make women and male writings even throughout a year, I do read more men. It also challenged me to think about the book I’m writing and introduced a new chapter where one of the female characters gets to have her own say in a way I hadn’t thought of before.
I’ve read other books about women novelists of the same period but this one had a clarity and strength of argument that made it feel pretty vital. I think anyone looking into books of the period should read this - and it’ll prompt them to want to read a whole range of new stuff in the future.
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