Masters of the English Novel: A Study of Principles and Personalities

We have seen in chapter seventh, how the influence of Balzac introduced to modern fiction that extension of subject and that preference for the external fact widely productive o...

The popularity of Richardson and Fielding showed itself in a hearty public welcome: and also in that sincerest form of flattery, imitation. Many authors began to write the new f...

The year after the appearance of "Pride and Prejudice" there began to be published in England a series of anonymous historical stories to which the name of Waverley Novels came...

George Eliot began fiction a decade later than Thackeray, but seems more than a decade nearer to us. With her the full pulse of modern realism is felt a-throbbing. There is no m...

There is some significance in the fact that Samuel Richardson, founder of the modern novel, was so squarely a middle-class citizen of London town. Since the form, he founded was...

In the first third of the nineteenth century English fiction stood at the parting of the ways. Should it follow Scott and the romance, or Jane Austen and the Novel of everyday l...

It is interesting to ask if Henry Fielding, barrister, journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his prede...

The habit of those who appraise the relative worth of Dickens and Thackeray to fall into hostile camps, swearing by one, and at the other, has its amusing side but is to be depr...

All the world loves a story as it does a lover. It is small wonder then that stories have been told since man walked erect and long before transmitted records. Fiction, a conven...

It has been said that Miss Austen came nearer to showing life as it is,--the life she knew and chose to depict,--than any other novelist of English race. In other words, she is...

By the year 1850, in England, the so-called Novel of realism had conquered. Scott in an earlier generation had by his wonderful gift made the romance fashionable. But, as we sai...

To exclude the living, as we must, in an estimate of the American contribution to the development we have been tracing, is especially unjust. Yet the principle must be applied....

Five or six writers of fiction, none of whom has attained a position like that of the three great Victorians already considered, yet all of whom loomed large in their day, have...

It is too early yet to be sure that Robert Louis Stevenson will make a more cogent appeal for a place in English letters as a writer of fiction than as an essayist. But had he n...