Cross‐channel exchanges in the rise of the novel in the long 18th century have become an emerging area of scholarly interest in the last decade, informed by new work on cultural exchanges and on translation theory, and earlier work on book history and reception studies. And yet this is an area that is yet to move beyond exceptional case studies of individual translations and translators, much less to fully articulate what is at stake for the study of the 18th‐century novel, or indeed 18th‐century studies more generally. This article traces the field from the mid‐1970s to today, arguing that the study of women writers has been central to our growing recognition that the novel was shaped by pan‐European and cross‐channel exchanges and translation. It concludes by highlighting the main threat to the field: the dearth of language‐learning. Translation – in the 18th century, and now – is thus presented as a political issue.