Strange though it may seem, the medium of extended prose was reserved for theological and philosophical treatises and works of scientific theory.

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

By common consent, the first great English novelist is Daniel Defoe. The son of a London butcher, he was a prolific author of religious tracts and essayist on political controversies of his day. A born controversialist, he took part in the Monmouth Rebellion against the Catholic King James II, and was sentenced to the public pillory and a term in Newgate prison for writing a heavily sarcastic pamphlet, The Shortest Way With The Dissenters, which satirised the Anglican church’s intolerance of non-conformity.

In 1719, Defoe turned to fiction, publishing his first and best-known novel, Robinson Crusoe. Based on the real-life story of shipwrecked Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, the book recounted the adventures of a man stranded on a remote island after his ship is attacked by pirates. With his native companion Friday, whom he coaches into an approximation of genteel European social manners, he discovers much about himself and about humanity’s relationship to its natural environment.

Later novels included Moll Flanders (1722), which relates the chaotic life of a London prostitute, and is the first English novel to have a woman as its central character, and Roxana (1724), in which the heroine descends from decorous gentility to a life of prostitution. Strikingly modern in their concerns, and yet written when their author was past 60, these books examine the ways in which individuals in the new urban society of the age either rise above or fall beneath their origins in life. Identity in the modern world has become fluid, uncertain, a matter of self-invention, and it is this that sets the tone for this new-fangled literary form.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)

A man of modest beginnings, Samuel Richardson went on to produce the great epic novels of the 18th century. He inherited from Defoe a fascination with female characters as the symbolic outsiders of a rapidly changing society, but the psychological depth in his portrayal of character is truly revolutionary. If Defoe’s protagonists are striking chiefly for the events that befall them, Richardson’s are all the more rounded and believable for the emotional realism with which they react to those events.

The twin pillars upon which Richardson’s reputation rests are his Pamela (1740), the tale of a serving-girl who is brutally seduced by and eventually marries her master, told in the form of a volume of letters that the author is ostensibly editing, and Clarissa (1747-8), the harrowing story of a woman subjected to a regime of sexual abuse by an amoral aristocrat, Lovelace, who is eventually responsible for her lonely death. Vast in scope (it remains the longest novel in the English language), and harrowing in its evocation of innocent suffering, it struck many readers as hard to swallow for the degree of patient stoicism with which Clarissa accepts her fate.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

An Eton-educated dramatist and novelist, Henry Fielding was much enjoyed for the satirical and bawdy edge his work displays. He wrote a famous parody of Richardson’s Pamela – Shamela (1741) – in which his gift for mimicry and his scorn for the sentimental tone were richly manifested. He is best known for Tom Jones (1749), a classic example of the literary genre known as the “picaresque”, in which the twists and turns of a hero’s life are related in exhaustive and colourful detail.

Arguably inaugurated, at least as far as the English tradition is concerned, by Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the style is given several further twists in Fielding’s preposterous tale of the boy who starts life as an abandoned child, but eventually comes into a fortune.

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)

Irish by birth, Sterne was educated at Cambridge and became an Anglican priest in Yorkshire. In 1760, he arrived in London, where he proved an instant social hit, despite (or perhaps because of) his regular descent into periods of dissolute abandon. His Sentimental Journey Through France And Italy remains, with Defoe’s account of his British tour, one of the great travel documents of the era, but the book for which he is chiefly known is one of the strangest literary works in the English language.

The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published serially between 1760 and 1767, is a kind of anti-novel, a parody of the genre at a very early stage in its development. It is almost as though Sterne is already taking advantage of the fact that the novel form in its infancy had no hard-and-fast rules or conventions, and so he can make it do whatever he wants. Its narrator sets out to tell his life-story, but gets waylaid so often by his own mental meanderings that it seems as though he will never even get as far as his own birth, let alone the philosophical thoughts of his maturity.

The book is not only peculiar in its self-defeating attempt to tell a story, it also looks very odd. There are blank pages and black pages, pages with diagrams and chapters that appear out of sequence. Its thorough-going experimentalism would not be surpassed until the great modernist works of 20th-century writers like James Joyce.

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)

There may be nothing of Tristram Shandy in the works of Jane Austen, but there is a little of Mrs Radcliffe. Also combining a career of travel writing and literary fiction, Ann Radcliffe was the foremost English exponent of what came to be known as the Gothic novel. These were fantasy stories containing all the elements of the horror stories of a later age – ruined castles in wild landscapes, tormented heroines and abductions in the dead of night.

Her work took the European reading public by storm in the 1790s, a time when the reported brutalities of the Terror that followed the French Revolution made many a talking point in civilised conversation. The Mysteries Of Udolpho, for which she received a then unprecedented £500 advance, indicates how commercially valuable this genre was. It was precisely that popularity that Austen satirises in her first completed work, Northanger Abbey (1798-1803). Invited to the ancestral home of the man whom she loves, the novel’s heroine, Catherine Morland, finds her imagination over-stimulated by the gloomy surroundings of the Abbey and her immersion in The Mysteries Of Udolpho.

Not considered among her major works, Northanger Abbey is nonetheless a blistering exercise in critical demolition. It put paid to Radcliffe’s literary reputation when published after Austen’s own death. And which of the two authors is better known now, two centuries later?