I do believe novels are a great tool in building empathy. Novels put you in someone else's shoes, and let you feel through the characters. Hunt had a quote that in brief said that through novels you learn to empathize with someone who is not yourself, or who is accessible to you but in some imaginary way is yourself. It is this identification with characters that makes you feel for them, their situations, and their problems in a very powerful way. I also have cried at many novels due to this! Somehow, for a period in time, the character's problems, grief, and feelings become your own.
However, Hunt's hypothesis that novels had the power to actually translate to real world change and social and human rights movements is a harder point to argue. The epistolary novels of the 18th century did proceed human rights movements, and I do not think these are completely unconnected. It makes sense that the elite, the ones who were reading these novels as they were the most likely to be literate, felt for perhaps the first time, empathy for those below them and those experiencing vastly different issues. The quote from Jefferson that stated that fiction produces the desire for moral emulation more than history is something many find true still today. Beyond reading historical facts, when you put a face, feelings, and stories behind them, it certainly hits you in a different way. Therefore, I agree that these novels aided human rights movements in some way, and that they were important. However I am not fully convinced of how powerful they were in these movements as Hunt argues, and I do believe the movements would have still happened without the novels present.