This book shows how early women novelists drew on debates about the self generated by the 'scientific' revolution to establish the novel as a genre and literary omniscience as a point of view. These writers such as Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Mary Davys used, explored, accepted, and rejected ideas about the self in their works to represent the act of knowing and what it means to be a knowing self.