It is a truth universally acknowledged in literary history that the epic poem after Milton was supplanted by the novel. The popular new form of narrative, focused on everyday life rather than on royalty or larger-than-life heroes or mythological and supernatural events, began to appear late in the seventeenth century, not long after the publication of Paradise Lost. Some of the earliest formulations of the novel liked to claim that it is factual, not feigned, and that it differed from the extravagant unrealities of romance narratives, aligning more properly with “history” and “biography.” In the preface to Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe—assuming the role of the “editor” of the manuscript of an actual life-story rather than the author of an invented character's adventures—is explicit: “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.” Defoe's artifice became a convention of the prefatory declarations of eighteenth-century novels, but he also had a precursor.

“This is a true story,” Aphra Behn wrote in the Dedication to Oroonoko (1688), often taken to be the first modern novel. Adopting the pretense that in her travels to South America she had encountered and interviewed the slave whose name provides the title of her story, Behn inaugurated the practice of conflating fiction with truth that was at the heart of the realistic novel. “I was myself an Eye-Witness to a great part of what you will find here set down,” Behn lies in her preface. From its beginnings, the novel presented itself as fiction that lies like the truth. This paradox was a crucial element in the transition from epic poem to novel. Paradise Lost had been esteemed for many reasons and one of them was that in choosing the story of the Fall in the garden as his subject Milton had advanced epic to a new plane: His narrative could claim to be and could be perceived as both marvelous and true. The mythological and legendary subjects of earlier epic were rendered obsolete. As Adam and Eve left Eden in the final lines of the poem and headed into the larger, unknown world beyond its borders they entered into the realm of the indisputably real.