Depreciation of Women: A Study in Austen s Selected Novels

The historians have wrongly assumed that the words “Fiction” and “novel” are synonymous and interchangeable. At the heart of the confusion is the fact that the story is common to both. So as men have told stories there has been fiction, whether in verse or prose and only to this extent it is true to say that any work of fiction written before about 1670 in England is, in some sense, an ancestor of the novel. But the novel itself is something new (Walter Allen, 1954: p.13).