Pamela (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1748) of English writer Samuel Richardson helped to legitimize the novel as a literary form in English. People best know major 18th-century epistolary novels Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Richardson, an established printer and publisher for most of his life, at the age of 51 years then wrote his first novel; people immediately most admired him of his time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel\_...