The Guardian calls Philip Hensher's 'A History of the Novel in Britain' 'a masterpiece of criticism'
The Guardian has published a review of Philip Hensher's A History of the Novel in Britain, headlined "a masterpiece of criticism," on August 12, 2026. The book, a 704-page hardback from Penguin's Pelican Books imprint (ISBN 9780241558140), traces English fiction from 1719, when Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, through to the present. The Guardian
Hensher is himself an experienced novelist — his fiction includes The Friendly Ones, reviewed in the Guardian in 2018, and A Small Revolution in Germany, reviewed there in 2020. That background informs the book's approach: rather than academic chapters worked through author by author, the review describes a joined-up account of creative call and response, each writer answering the one before.
The pattern starts early. Samuel Richardson, a printer before he was a novelist, wrote Pamela in 1740 and retained his own copyrights, which gave him unusual autonomy in shaping a genre still finding its feet. Henry Fielding fired back with Shamela (1741), a parody, and Joseph Andrews (1742), an inversion. Richardson's Clarissa (1748) runs to roughly a million words, all in letters. Then Fielding published Tom Jones in 1749, and Richardson answered him with The History of Sir Charles Grandison in 1754.
The commercial realities behind these works are just as vivid. Jane Austen sold Pride and Prejudice to the publisher Thomas Egerton in 1812 for a flat fee — a one-off payment with no share of future sales. She had previously retained copyright on Sense and Sensibility and paid for the printing herself, losing money on the deal. When Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1813, the print was tiny, the paper was described as scrappy, and readers called the production "almost unintelligible."
The review credits Hensher with rehabilitating writers who have fallen out of fashion. He describes Hannah More as "a beautiful and graceful writer." He makes the case for Tobias Smollett as an inventive craftsman with supreme control over narrative voice. And he argues that Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale (1908) "ought to be acknowledged among the 20 greatest novels in English."
Pelican Books, the imprint carrying the study, is Penguin's non-fiction paperback line, revived in 2014 after decades of dormancy to publish serious works for a general readership. Penguin Australia lists the book for publication on 1 December 2026 as a 704-page hardback.
What makes the review's praise worth noting is the scale of the book's ambition. A survey of three centuries of the novel in Britain, written by a working novelist rather than a literature professor, is a rare thing. The Guardian's verdict — its own headline, not a pull-quote from a publisher — places the book alongside the tradition it describes: a critic who is also a practitioner, reading the genre from the inside.
