I haven’t heard of Eliza Haywood since a long-ago girlfriend found that she loved Haywood’s works. She (the girlfriend) went on to become a university English literature professor, and wrote and edited books about Haywood.
I’ve heard Japan’s The Tale of Genji cited as the first (known) worldwide.
??? Pamela was a fairly trashy and melodramatic romance novel, but I don’t see that Robinson Crusoe was ‘literary’.
Anyway, the English novel as a popular concept started with Pamela. Robinson Crusoe was popular for many years, but nobody was reading the ‘new Robinson Crusoe’. Pamela started an avalanche of imitation.
However, Pamela was episodic. Reading a non-episodic novel requires a different way of reading, and the episodic form remained popular even as the new form evolved.
I think you’d find a lot of people English Departments who would disagree with that.
Anyway, I referring to Eliza Haywood’s novels.
That’s probably why @Dendarii_Dame’s professor said that Pamela was really the first novel, in his opinion.
I disagree. The OED gives the first use of ‘novel’ as ‘a fictitious prose narrative or tale of considerable length’ in 1639, and ‘novelist’ as a writer of novels in 1728.
Eliza Haywood’s books were called novels, they were novels as we understand the term, and they were highly popular.
Before her, and before Defoe, there was Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), which some people regard as the first novel.
I’m surprised. Perhaps they haven’t read it.