SOURCE: "Fiction in the 1740s: Backgrounds, Topics, Strategies" in Novels of the 1740s, University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp. 1-2.

In the following excerpt, Beasley notes that Coventry was among the first critics to argue that the novel genre had literary merit.

During the earlier decades of the eighteenth century, the problem of public acceptance faced by the aspiring writer of fiction was truly a formidable one. In an age still under the powerful influence of Locke, Descartes, Newton, and the seventeenth-century Puritan apologists, an age which placed so much intellectual and moral emphasis on the value of empirically verifiable "truth," fiction was "false."² In an atmosphere charged with the presence of the great Augustans Pope and Swift, fiction rested on no solid and respectable foundations of quality, literary tradition, or critical theory. Even quite able works by avowed novelists like Jane Barker, Penelope Aubin, and Mary Davys suffered...