More than half a century after the publication in 1957 of Ian Watt's seminal study The Rise of the Novel, those who conceive of the origins and development of the English novel largely in evolutionary terms still do not seem fully to appreciate the challenge presented to the expectations of contemporary “novel and romance readers” by the publication towards the end of April 1719 of The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner … Written by Himself. Daniel Defoe made strenuous efforts not only to distinguish his narratives from mere “Novels and Romances,” but also to convince his readers that what they were reading was “not a Story, but a History.” In itself, this particular ploy was not new. In the dedication to The Fair Jilt (1688), for instance, Aphra Behn maintained that “this little History” was not “Fiction,” but “Reality, and Matter of Fact, and acted in this our latter Age,” and most of Behn's immediate female successors, as Rosalind Ballaster has noted, tended to resort to this type of substantiating claim. However, in drawing his readers' attention in the prefaces to his narratives to the relationship between fact and fiction, Defoe emphasized the biographical element in his stories to an extent hitherto unheard of, and the response in the first half of the 1720s to the authenticating devices adopted in his series of spurious autobiographies appears to have been significantly difierent from that which occurred in the previous century.