Later on, picturization of real Bengali life became a common topic. In the early stage, glorification of the religious beliefs and lives was the theme of most of the novels. (First Bengali novel Alaler Ghore Dulal was published in 1858 and Anowara was published in 1914.) In its history of about one hundred years, novels of Bangladesh got a good number of novels where creative emancipation of the writers has been established.
Novels of Bangladesh fall almost fifty years behind the Bengali novels. Dhaka, on the other hand, could not participate in the early stage, but literature created by and of the people of Bangladesh area later on flourished with notable success. Almost all these literary activities went on in full swing in Kolkata. But some great novelists like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Manik Bandopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay developed the newly introduced genre in such a way that 'new' changed into 'matured' through their works. According to Ananda Sanker and Lila Ray, 'when the novel was introduced in Bengali in the middle of the 19th century, the form itself was new, the prose in which it was written was new, the secular tone was new in a country hitherto wholly dominated by religion, and the society in which and for which it was written was new' (p. 168).
Though the first Bengali novel was Karuna O Phulmonir Bibaran (1852), the Bengali novel actually started its journey with Durgeshnandini written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1865. Bengali novels occupy a major part of Bengali literature.