‘The Novel in Ireland before the Novel’ locates the first Irish novels in the latter part of the seventeenth century, pointing to fictions by Roger Boyle (Parthenissa, 1651–69) and Robert Boyle (The Martyrdom of Theodora, and of Didymus, 1687) as foundational texts in an Irish novelistic tradition. Other early extended works of fiction, which have a claim to constitute the earliest instances of Irish novels, include the anonymous The Irish Rogue (1690), William Congreve’s Incognita (1692), the anonymous Vertue Rewarded (1693), and Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704). Collectively, these works, and those of later writers such as Mary Davys and Sarah Butler, begin the history of the Irish novel. These heterogeneous and transnational works of authors writing from the mid seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries show the influence of the French romance, Spanish novelas picarescas, classical literature, English and Irish rogue literature, Irish chronicle, and modern history, underlining the hybrid origins of the Irish novel.