The first part looks at how the novel came into being. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe changed the literary landscape in 1719 for ever. Writers soon realised the power of the novel to infiltrate the human mind. Less than a century later, Jane Austen took literature to new heights of sophistication . This documentary also considers Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Richardson’s novel ‘Clarissa’ took the novel into the internal world of the characters, whereas Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’ was more action and plot based. Jane Austen followed by combining the two approaches in her novels.
Part two looks at the 19th century - a golden age for British fiction with great authors such as Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Thackeray. Not only did they paint a riveting portrait of society, but they created some of the most enduring female characters in fiction, from Jane Eyre, to Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke. During this period, the novel found new subjects to explore and new ways of reflecting a society in the midst of enormous change and upheaval.
Part three looks at how modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D H Lawrence threw out the rule book to take the novel deeper into the human mind, tacking previously taboo subjects. This generally turned off the reading public who turned to more populist writers such as H G Wells and Arnold Bennett.
The final part looks at how in postwar Britain, authors tended to shy away from the idea of the great epic novel. A new breed of writers such as Kingsley Amis brought a fresh irreverent and ironic slant to fiction. In the 1960s there was even talk of the ‘death of the novel’, yet fiction continues to flourish