Excerpt from The Mary Carleton Narratives, 1663-1673: A Missing Chapter in the History of the English Novel Since in fiction itself no direct development toward the modern realistic novel has been found, historians have sought it in other literary types of the seventeenth century. The influence that the century exercised on the growth of prose fiction, says Mr. Raleigh, the foundations it laid for the coming novel, are to be sought, not in the writers of romance, but in the followers of other branches of literature, often remote enough from fiction, in satirists and allegorists, newspaper scribes and biographers, writers of travel and adventure, and fashionable comic playwrights. For the novel least of all forms of literature can boast a pure extrac tion; it is of a mixed and often disreputable ancestry. 2 To complete the list of the novelist's predecessors, one should mention the writers of the character, of the familiar and the imaginary letter, of the conduct book, and of the moral essay.3 In many of these forms, the second half of the seven teenth century developed traits recognizably similar to vari ous elements of the coming novel. The prevalent theory is, then, that by observing such traits, for example, the realistic expression of passion in The Portuguese Letters or the conversational vigor of Restoration comedy, and thereupon combining them in a new way, novelists learned their art. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.