Why a history of the novel in ants? It makes perfect sense because ants live in an almost exclusively female society. And as Ian Watt noted in THE RISE OF THE NOVEL, the majority of eighteenth century novels were written by -- as well as read by women. The prevalence of women as readers and authors of fiction has continued to the present day. Within their all-female society, ants have conflicts, ants have ambitions and disappointments, ants have victories and defeats. Inhabiting an underground fortress of winding, labyrinthine galleries, ants can be gothic or postmodernist as the plot requires. For them the above-ground world of predators and enemies has a painful realism when it is not violently picaresque. Imagine translating Jane Austen into ants: your six-legged heroine will have not one or two but hundreds of gossiping, posturing, romantically and socially ambitious sisters, all striving to get precedence of one another. Or don't bother imagining it for yourself -- just read A HISTORY OF THE NOVEL IN ANTS. Carol Hart is a freelance science writer with a rusty PhD in English Literature. She reads a great many novels and she never steps on ants. This is her first novel.