The Empty Decade? English Fiction in the 1730s

Prose fictions from Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) to works by Daniel Defoe, Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and Eliza Haywood in the 1720s are well known, as are the great novels published beginning in the 1740s by Samuel Richardson, Sarah and Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and many more. Fiction published in the 1730s, in contrast, is little studied. This essay and a chart of all fiction, including translations, published in that decade aim to place this fiction in the history of the English novel and argue that the period was a time when transformative elements, such as a stronger politicization of texts, became common. Older forms survived but also were adapted or even revolutionized, and glimmers of the new shapes and purposes of novels emerged.