A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher review – a masterpiece of criticism
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- Philip Hensher published a 600-page single-author history of the British novel spanning 1719 (Defoe's Robinson Crusoe) to 2000 (Zadie Smith), deliberately stopping short of contemporary fiction on the grounds that proper critical judgment requires distance.
- Hensher wrote the entire survey himself rather than commissioning academic specialists, producing what the reviewer calls 'a joined-up account of creative call and response' instead of disconnected silos.
- Hensher's experience as a novelist informs practitioner-level close readings, including why some chapters of Dickens's Dombey and Son use the present tense and how Henry James handles free indirect speech in What Maisie Knew.
- Hensher offers a forensic account of rival novelists Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, contrasting Richardson's copyright-retaining printer model with Fielding's patron-supported publishing, and tracing their point-for-point literary retaliation from Pamela (1740) through Sir Charles Grandison (1754).
- Jane Austen sold Pride and Prejudice for a flat fee to Thomas Egerton in 1812 after losing money on Sense and Sensibility; the 1813 first edition was printed in such tiny type and on such scrappy paper that disgruntled readers called it 'almost unintelligible.'
- Hensher rehabilitates writers the canon has shortchanged—Hannah More, Tobias Smollett, and especially Arnold Bennett, whose The Old Wives' Tale (1908) is named one of the 20 greatest English novels—while dismissing Ann Radcliffe as 'a simply terrible writer,' DM Thomas as 'patently untalented,' and David Lodge as 'not up to the task.'
- Hensher argues that much 1960–1980 'experimentalism' merely retreaded earlier innovations, citing Fanny Burney's unnamed characters (1814), Waugh's fragmentary collage in Vile Bodies (1930), and Fielding's self-reflexivity.
Why it matters: For readers of British fiction, Hensher's volume rewrites the canon in real time—restoring Bennett, Smollett and More to prominence while puncturing Radcliffe, Thomas and Lodge—and his hard cutoff at 2000 means it functions as a fixed critical reference rather than a rolling cultural take, making it the kind of book that will reshape undergraduate reading lists for a generation.
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