“There is good reason for giving particular attention to the 1740s, not just because of the surge in publishing associated with political turmoil, but also because this was the threshold decade for the great take-off in book trade productivity in the eighteenth century”: thus observes James Raven in his magisterial The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (2007) (at 130). As literary historians widely agree, this decade also featured intense debates about what by then had become the “simple abstraction” of the genre of the “novel,” as Michael McKeon explains in his wide-ranging Origins of the English Novel: 1660–1740 (1987). Leah Orr's Novel Ventures examines the decades just preceding the 1740s benchmark, aiming to construct a lens through which we could skeptically ask whether this decade and its fiction were remarkable at all. As Orr explains at the study's outset, 1690 to 1730 is a “somewhat arbitrary” range designed to highlight “the whole of this time period of dramatic change in fiction” (5). And she concludes by provocatively asserting “‘[d]id the novel rise?’ is a loaded question, and the answer ‘No’ is implied by my asking it at all” (263). In a welcome combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies drawn from book history and from novel studies, Orr presents a comprehensive view of early fiction in England, privileging market logics over aesthetic and personal determinations. She thus highlights such facts as the expense of book production, the relatively small market for fiction, and the prominence of translations and adaptations of earlier literature.

Orr's study is at its best when it presents comparative statistical data. The first chapter surveys title pages, prefaces, and dedications, developing a historically grounded vocabulary for defining the genres of fiction. Orr's statistical data for 1690 through 1730 indicate that “novel” and “history” come in with by far the highest incidence—novel at 29 percent and history at 28 percent—evidencing their confident use as marketing tools several decades before the novel debates of the 1740s. The second chapter considers economic data about the period's book market, emphasizing the costliness of production and the financial risks of publishing fiction. Between 1690 and 1730, fiction held a market share of between 0.5 percent and 2 percent, Orr reveals, and prominent booksellers allocated to it between 1 percent and 14 percent of their total output. In the third chapter, Orr points out that anonymous publication was the norm during these decades: author attributions tended to be included primarily in reprints of successful titles in collected works and anthologies. The next chapter, “Reprints of Earlier English Fiction,” develops from the observation that a quarter of all fictions published between 1690 and 1730 were adaptations of previously successful works, and that the sources of these reprints were not clearly historicized by their publishers. Although such dating seems not to have concerned early printers and readers, Orr proceeds by sorting titles according to their historical provenance—with sections on medieval sources, Elizabethan sources, reprints of fiction from 1610 to 1660 and from 1660 to 1679, and, finally, titles from the 1680s. Orr devotes the next chapter, “Foreign Fiction in English Translation,” to a niche that captured another quarter of the book market between 1690 and 1730—and she turns in the following two chapters to new original English fiction. Comparing numbers of translations and new fictions, Orr identifies a reversal at the turn of the century. Whereas translations exceeded original literature in the later seventeenth century, by the early years of the eighteenth century, publishers printed new fiction and translations in equal numbers. And from then on new fiction steadily exceeded translations. Orr also interestingly observes that didactic, crime, and adventure literature were all reprinted over decades, whereas amorous fiction was not; on the other hand, amorous fiction scored highest in new titles—seventy-six works over the course of the decades she studies. In chapters 4 through 7, Orr also offers plot summaries and brief observations on motifs and formal features of scores of texts that went through multiple editions and reprints within the study's date range, thus attending to works that hitherto received little scholarly notice.

Orr's “primary objective is … to understand better what the original readers might have thought of these texts, and what their expectations for fiction were” (14–15); her “argument … is that booksellers published what they believed would sell, and in this period they exerted far greater influence on the development of fiction than did individual authors or acts of creative genius” (5). With this study's aims thus stated, one may expect some discussion of booksellers’ and readers’ memoires, diaries, letters, and anecdotes. Such evidence would have testified to booksellers’ “beliefs” and to original readers “thoughts,” when publication numbers alone can indicate numerous varying motivations: efforts at cartelization, trials at expanding custom and testing new markets, calculations of libel risks, and the like—varying motivations that, as Raven explains, support complicated long-term, rather than short-term, calculations of sales. Additionally, given the centrality of fiction to Novel Ventures’ subject, the importance of quantitative analysis to its methodology, and its persistent polemic with rise-of-the-novel scholars, it is surprising not to find mentions of Catherine Gallagher and Franco Moretti. Gallagher and Moretti have not only presented influential theses about fictionality and quantitative literary methodology respectively, but also developed innovative textual analyses, offering inspiring models for subsequent scholars working with fiction and quantitative data.

Nonetheless, Novel Ventures stands as a valuable resource for statistical information on publication titles and for introductory textual analyses of literature that has yet to receive scholarly attention. As such, it importantly broadens and deepens our sense of the literary field in England between 1690 and 1730.