In Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Elliot’s objection to Captain Harville—that men have “had every advantage” in writing about men and women both—might equally be applied to the early discourse of “the rise of the novel,” which, for decades, ignored most women writers except Austen. Scholarship over the last half century has not only given greater critical attention to these writers, but also, as the novel’s origins have increasingly been linked with other forms—letters, essays, news, poetry, plays, etc.—so too has it called...