‘A History of the Novel in Britain’ by Philip Hensher review

Philip Hensher’s A History of the Novel in Britain is certainly novel but how does it fare as history?

Robert Eaglestone | Published in History Today Volume 76 Issue 10 October 2026

Man reads gothic novel The Monk aloud in a toilet, 1802-4. Rijksmuseum. Public Domain.

There is a really good book trying to escape from Philip Hensher’s A History of the Novel in Britain. The potential escapee is by Philip Hensher, successful novelist, but it is imprisoned by Philip Hensher, much less successful literary historian. These two aspects of the same author are so conflicted they even have different voices. Hensher-as-novelist writes with clarity, insight, and passion in the first person. Hensher-as-literary-historian sounds like a parody of a crabby 1950s professor, passing down unargued opinions as definitive judgements: a novel is ‘worth our attention’ or ‘blundering’; the prose wanders; this voice, too, repeatedly attacks shadowy ‘gatekeepers of the novel’.

First, the good. It is an excellent idea to get a novelist to write about novels. Novelists, quite rightly, read novels the way carpenters look at joinery: how has this effect been achieved? How is the character made memorable? How does the plot actually work? These practical questions almost always disclose aspects of great significance. Professors of literature (like me) call this ‘literary form’; Hensher, a novelist, calls this technique. Whenever his history discusses technique, or developments in technique, it is interesting. With great writers – Austen, Dickens, Eliot – it is illuminating, but where Hensher-as-novelist is revelatory is with authors who are today, sadly, less read. His discussion of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-48), for example, is superb: insightful about the weaving of style, history, social commentary, character, plot, and ways of writing that Thackeray invents. The book makes a powerful case for out-of-favour novelists such as George Moore: ‘inventive, absorbing and truthful’. Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) ‘is a miracle of human sympathy … but a miracle too, of technical command’. I bought copies of Moore’s Esther Waters (1894) and the Bennett as soon as I finished Hensher’s account.

If this had been a book by a novelist just about the history of literary technique, tracing innovations from novel to novel, it would have been a wonder. Sadly, it is not. Hensher-as-literary-historian is much less impressive.

A history shapes events, narrates a story, offers a frame, it has ideas: but, apart from some rather superficial discussions about copyright and the economics of publishing, and introductory comments on the novel and ‘possibility of social change’, Hensher does not tell a story. Perhaps this is because the very shape of the novel in Britain is too multifarious to fit into any one frame.

But perhaps it is also because Hensher-as-literary-historian has not read very much about the history of the novel: indeed, he has read only what you might expect an average undergraduate in English from the mid 1980s/early 1990s to have read. A historian studies not just the archive but how other historians shape and frame that archive. (Imagine an account of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell with no reference at all to Geoffrey Elton.) For example, one of the most famous books in the discipline of English – still in press, still read and taught, still disagreed with – is Ian Watt’s 1957 The Rise of The Novel (it is so famous that there is a wonderful book by Marina MacKay about how Watt’s experience as a PoW in Changi prison fashioned his view of the 18th-century novel). Watt’s book is absent, except in a few half-recalled phrases, as if cribbed from long-ago lecture notes. Many other important books and ideas are missing too, as is almost everything written on the development of the novel since the 1990s. There is nothing, for example, about all scholars have learned from the digitisation of all the novels from the 19th century: there is a great, highly accessible book on this, Ted Underwood’s 2019 Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change. A book for the general reader is not a scholarly monograph but the general reader should expect to be kept up to date, rather than have defunct prejudices from old seminars foisted upon them.

This noticeable lack combined with Hensher’s focus on technique leads to problems. An instance relevant to History Today: Walter Scott was one of the most famous writers of the 19th century and Hensher is right that he is not known for innovation in technique. Instead, his innovation lies in ideas. Scott changed how history was written and understood by historians as well as by novelists and the public: his influence lies obviously in the historical novel (up to and including Bernard Cornwell) as well as the adventure novel and in many forms of fantasy (Tolkien is very like Scott in form, only, of course, with elves). Hensher fails to see this. As another example, Hensher-the-literary-historian buys into the argument from John Carey’s 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses that modernist writers such as Woolf and Joyce aimed ‘to write something that will demonstrably exclude most readers’: they do not meet his approval. But Hensher-as-novelist applauds innovation in experimental novelists like Ronald Firbank: an odd bifurcation in this book.

The book frequently attacks academics. Of course, boffins like me find this tiresome, but, more irritatingly, these attacks are just plain wrong: it is just not true that Austen scholars are unaware of Frances Burney’s influence on her; Tolkien is, in fact, taught in universities and of interest to scholars, and so on (and so on). Hensher frames himself as an opponent to these sinister gatekeepers but, of course, a professor himself and writing a history for a major publisher, he is one of them.

Hensher wants to create a ‘British library of the novel’ on the grounds that we have taken its heritage for granted, ‘never needing to do anything to preserve it’. This silly remark will come as a shock to the thousands of English teachers who pull year 10 and 11s through the 19th-century novel every year, as well as to academics teaching the history of the novel. The heritage of the novel will not be preserved by being memorialised, but by being read: something Hensher-the-novelist knows but Hensher-the-historian has forgotten.