Early Manifestations and Some Definitions

This chapter looks to outline the diversity and complexity of historical novel writing from its earliest manifestations. The chapter traces the establishment of the historical novel as a form from the 1600s onwards, looking at work by Cervantes and by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne (known as Madame de La Fayette), texts from the Gothic tradition and theoretical writing by William Godwin. The chapter particularly focuses on reconfiguring the narrative of the historical novel’s development by emphasising experimentation, fragmentation, and complexity. There are specific sections on Jane Porter, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott as novelists, and on Franco Moretti’s concepts of Distant Reading as a theoretical approach. Considering the work of Porter, Edgworth, and their contemporary female novelists such as Jane West and Sophia Lee as originary to the development of the historical novel affords new insight into the way that the form was shaped by female writers from the outset.