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Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726. New York: St Martin's Press, 1999. £32.00.
In Women and the Rise of the Novel, Josephine Donovan offers a new perspective on the emergence of the novel, a genre - or perhaps antigenre - that has proved hard to pin down to a unitary point of origin. Donovan advances a distinctive feminist reading by exploring the role that women writers of the early modern period contributed to the rise of the novel. In doing so, she adopts a less Anglo-centric focus than either Ian Watt or Michael McKeon: in addition to considering Englishlanguage writings, Donovan's book provides an important comparative focus by examining prose fiction from the French, Spanish and Italian literary traditions. Donovan consequently maps a more cosmopolitan genealogy for the novel, much as Margaret Anne Doody has achieved in her astonishingly wide-ranging The True Story of the Novel (1997). Donovan also embraces Doody' s claim that the novel was rising well before the early eighteenth century. Although she does not take it so far back as Doody (Graeco-Roman classical culture), Donovan traces the origins of the novel to 1405 and Christine de Pizan's framed-novelle Livre de la cité des dames; in other words, almost two centuries prior to the 1600 starting point selected by Michael McKeon for the Origins of the English Novel (1987).
Donovan's aims are both archaeologically literary-historical and theoretical. From the literary-historical perspective, she seeks to broaden the canon of women's prose fiction recognised as prefiguring the emergence of the novels of the 1720s-40s celebrated by Ian Watt: accordingly, Aphra Behn is assigned less prominence and significance than the relatively neglected Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle's Nature's Pictures...