Epics are sung and plays are staged, but the novel was made for a reader alone with a book. A novel is a long work of prose fiction, usually concerned with characters' inner lives and their place in a society. Because it has room, a novel can follow people over years, show how they change and let a reader live inside their heads. Its history is older and more global than many people assume.

The Tale of Genji

Around the year 1000 in Heian Kyo, today's Kyoto, The Tale of Genji was written by a lady at the Heian court of Japan known to history as Murasaki Shikibu; her real name is unknown. In fifty four chapters it follows Hikaru Genji, the "shining" son of an emperor who is made a commoner for political reasons, through his loves, his exile and his return, and then follows his descendants after his death. Court men of the time wrote mostly in Chinese, while women wrote in the Japanese script, and so one of Japan's greatest books came out of a woman's world of letters, screens and seasons. The work is often called the world's first novel, though the claim depends on how one defines the form.

Its emotional tone gave Japanese criticism a lasting term. In the eighteenth century the scholar Motoori Norinaga argued that the heart of Genji was mono no aware, a gentle sorrow at the passing of things: falling blossoms, fading beauty, love that cannot last.

Don Quixote

In Spain, Miguel de Cervantes published Part One of Don Quixote in 1605 and Part Two in 1615. A minor gentleman of La Mancha reads so many tales of knights that, in John Ormsby's 1885 translation, his "brains got so dry that he lost his wits." He sets out as a knight errant with a practical peasant, Sancho Panza, as his squire, attacking windmills he takes for giants. Don Quixote is often called the first modern novel because it plays with the gap between books and reality. In Part Two, characters have read Part One, and the knight even meets people who know of a fake sequel by another author that appeared in 1614. This is an early, brilliant case of metafiction: fiction that draws attention to its own status as fiction.

The novel also grew elsewhere. In China, Cao Xueqin's eighteenth century Dream of the Red Chamber traced the decline of a great family through hundreds of characters. In England, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the novels that followed won a large new middle class readership.

Nineteenth century realism

The nineteenth century was the great age of the realist novel. Realism aims to depict ordinary life and society as they actually are, without idealizing them. Honoré de Balzac's linked novels mapped Paris from attic to mansion. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) told of a doctor's wife in a dull town who ruins herself chasing the romance she has read about, and after the novel first appeared in a magazine, Flaubert was tried for offending public morals; he was acquitted. Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, George Eliot's Middlemarch and the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky set private lives against war, money, faith and social change. Brazil's Machado de Assis and the Philippines' José Rizal brought the form to new places and new arguments.

Realists defended their work in moral terms. George Eliot wrote in 1856 that "the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies." A key technique for that extension is free indirect discourse: third person narration that slips into a character's own thoughts and words, so that the reader hears both the narrator and the character in the same sentence. Jane Austen and Flaubert were masters of it.

Worked example: Emma's first sentence

Jane Austen's Emma (1815) opens: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." Read closely. The list "handsome, clever, and rich" sounds like Emma's own pleased view of herself. Then comes one small word: "seemed." The narrator is gently warning us that appearance and reality may differ. "Very little to distress or vex her" hints that a person who has never been troubled may not yet understand others.

This is free indirect style working in miniature: we are inside Emma's confidence and outside it at once. The whole novel follows how her certainty about other people, especially her plans for a poorer young woman she thinks she can improve, causes harm until she learns to see others as people with their own minds. A realist novel's quiet lesson is that other people are as real to themselves as we are to ourselves, which is one of the foundations of treating them as ends, not tools.