George Saintsbury was one of the most prolific and wide-ranging literary critics of the late Victorian era, and his two-volume History of the French Novel remains a landmark of English-language scholarship on French fiction. This first volume traces the development of the novel in France from its earliest origins through Rabelais, Lafayette, Prévost, Voltaire, and Rousseau up to the year 1800.
Opinionated, erudite, and frequently entertaining, Saintsbury is a guide worth reading in his own right. Download this public-domain text as a free EPUB.