SOURCE: "The Female Wits: Women Writers of the Restoration and the Early Eighteenth Century," in The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800, Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 36-51.

In the following excerpt, Todd surveys the primary female novelists of the genre's early development, as well as the major styles adopted by those pioneers.

Ever since Caxton founded his printing press in the fifteenth century fiction had been printed in England—and condemned as escapist and vulgar by the guardians of high culture. Its vulgarity was due to its association with the vernacular but also perhaps to its connection with women. From the Middle Ages onwards, the association of romance with women and idleness was expressed in the constant male fear that a perusal of fiction would corrupt female morals.

In Elizabethan England, Lyly, Sidney and Greene assumed women among the readership for their courtly romances. Greene was...