THE MAJOR NOVELISTS FOR EDUCATION

‎Defoe was nearly sixty when he turned to writing novels. In 1719 he published his famous Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, followed by two less engrossing sequels. Based in part on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, Robinson Crusoe describes the daily life of a man marooned on a desert island. Defoe brought the diversity of enthusiasms into play in writing his novels. Defoe was one of the first to write stories about believable characters in realistic situations using simple prose. Robinson Crusoe was an immediate success at home and on the Continent, is a unique fictional blending of the traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the nature of man as social creature and an extraordinary ability to invent a sustaining modern myth. Although there are exciting episodes in the novel-Crusoe rescuing his man Friday from cannibals-its main interest derives from the way in which Crusoe overcomes the extraordinary difficulties of life on the island while preserving his human integrity. Robinson Crusoe is considered by some critics to be the first true novel in English which gave Defoe literary immortality. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) displays enticing powers of self-projection int Defoe can only have had experience through the narrations of others, and both Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724) lure the reader into puzzling relationships with narrators the degree of whose own self-awareness is repeatedly and provocatively placed in doubt. Defoe's writing is always straightforward and vivid, with an astonishing concern for circumstantial detail. into a situation of which

‎Samuel Richardson

‎The enthusiasm prompted by Defoe's best novels demonstrated the growing readership for innovative prose narrative. Samuel Richardson a prosperous London printer was the next major author to respond to the challenge. His Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740) the epistolary form tells a story of an employer's attempted seduction of a young servant woman her subsequent victimization and her eventual reward in virtuous marriage with the penitent exploiter. Its moral tone is self-consciously rigorous and proved highly controversial. Its main strength lies in the resourceful, sometimes comically vivid imagining of the moment by moment fluctuations of the heroine's consciousness as she faces her ordeal. Pamela herself is the sole letter writer and the technical limitations are strongly felt though Richardson's ingenuity works hard to mitigate them. But Pamela's frank speaking about the abuses of masculine and gentry power sounds the sceptical note more radically developed in Richardson's masterpiece Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), which has a just claim to being considered the most reverberant and moving tragic fiction in the English novel tradition. Clarissa uses multiple narrators and develops a profoundly suggestive interplay of opposed voices. At its centre is the taxing soul debate and eventually mortal combat between the aggressive brilliantly improvisatorial libertine Lovelace and the beleaguered Clarissa, maltreated and abandoned by her family but abiding sternly loyal to her own inner sense of probity. The tragic consummation that grows from this involves an astonishingly ruthless testing of the psychological natures of the two leading characters. After such intensities, Richardson's final novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54) is perhaps inevitably a less ambitious cooler work but its blending of serious moral discussion and a comic ending ensured it an influence on hos successors especially jane Austen.