In 1957 I published a book called The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. About ten years later the editors of the critical journal Novel asked me for my "second thoughts" about it. I supplied them reluctantly, and began with obvious irony on my dislike of critical polemic, saying that "having, long ago, grimly refrained from posting sundry devastating retorts to a few of the original reviewers of The Rise of the Novel, I didn't at first find the attractions of contributing to the present series sufficient to warrant discomposing my posture of heroic abnegation. Another reason, which I also described in my Novel article, was that "it wasn't as though, stumbling gamely along to my centenary, I couldn't any longer risk passing up one final opportunity to provide incredulous outrage amongst those still elbowing their way up the professional ladder" - outrage at the very thought of my continued existence - "Sblood! Not buried yet?" Now, another twenty years later, I have yielded again. Why? Partly because I found it more difficult to resist exposing myself "to the charge of self-important anecdotage" under the combined blandishments of a long-distance telephone call from Washington and a relatively handsome fee. And also, perhaps, there was the thought that I am now, at the age of seventy, somewhat closer to what might be my final opportunity.
Why was I asked to discuss Dale Spender's recent book, The Mothers of the Novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen? Largely because I and my Rise of the Novel, together with Walter Allen and his The English Novel, have been selected by Dale Spender as her favorite whipping boys. She writes of my book that I "opened with the bald statement that the novel was begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, and that it was the genius of these three men that had created the new form." When I refreshed my memory of what I had actually written, what I found was "if we assume, as is commonly done," that the novel is a new literary form "and that it was begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding," how does it differ from the prose fiction of the past? I had started, then, with a common assumption; it was not a personal statement, bald or otherwise, and there is a considerable difference, although I believe the assumption about Defoe, Richardson and Fielding is still widespread today. I then go on to say that my aim in The Rise of the Novel is to examine the distinctive literary features in the works of these three authors, and to consider whether historical and social factors may provide "any reason why these differences appeared when and where they did."
Dale Spender, then, is not given to quotation, but to loose and careless summary; she is, indeed, deaf to what I actually say. For instance, I had written that
women were playing an increasingly important part in the literary scene. The majority of eighteenth-century novels were actually written by women, but this had long remained a purely quantitative assertion of dominance; it was Jane Austen who completed the work that Fanny Burney had begun, and challenged masculine prerogative in a much more important manner...in revealing the intricacies of personal relationships.
On this Dale Spender comments: "How very damning is this faint and only praise" (118). I don't think the praise is particularly faint, either here or elsewhere; nor is my statement at all antifeminist, as my subsequent two paragraphs
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