"Novelist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... novelist. This old house, with its sanded floors and high wainscots, and its narrow windows looking out upon a cluster of pines that turn themselves into aeolian harps every time the wind blows, would be the place ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... genuine service as head of a department; he was not even a good clerk; he was a wretched speaker; he was consumed by a morbid shyness, almost as oppressive as that of the poet Cowper in a later day, or of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American novelist, later still. His whole public career was at best but a harmless mistake. It has done no harm to his literary fame. The world has almost forgotten it. Even lovers of Addison might have to be reminded now that the creator of Sir Roger de Coverley ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... responded Reggie, with a groan. "No; I'm an author, novelist; and I'm engaged on a big detective story. That's why I get all the practice I can. You ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... it is his not merely to amuse or to please, but to lead mankind nearer to the eternal ideal—Shelley called it Intellectual Beauty—which is the only abiding reality. This is the real theme of his 'Defence of Poetry' (1821), the best piece of prose he ever wrote. Thomas Love Peacock, scholar, novelist, and poet, and, in spite of his mellow worldliness, one of Shelley's most admired friends, had published a wittily perverse and paradoxical article, not without much good sense, on 'The Four Ages of Poetry'. Peacock maintained that genuine poetry is only possible in half-civilised ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... the nadir, gathered his retreating army upon a hill in front of their intrenchments, but he was not permitted to rest there. A fresh Northern brigade, a reserve, had just arrived upon the field. Joining it to the forces of Lew Wallace, afterwards famous as a novelist, Grant hurled the entire division upon Pillow's weakened and ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... BOURCHIER declared that he read plays in the bath and that the best results were obtained by those selected either in the bath or on a long railway journey. "A man," he added, "is always at his best in his bath." Again, Mr. CHARLES GARVICE, the famous novelist, said that he always felt intensely musical while having his bath, though the ideas for his stories came chiefly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... American novelist of any note, was also the first professional man of letters in this country who supported himself entirely by his pen. He was born in Philadelphia in 1771, lived a part of his life in New York and part in his native ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... little appreciated; and he was one of the first Germans to discover the worth of Moerike, whom, later on, he made popular in Germany. Besides this, he read English and French writers. He liked Rabelais, and was very partial to Claude Tillier, the French novelist of the provinces, whose Oncle Benjamin has given pleasure to so many German provincial families, by bringing before them, as Wolf said, the vision of their own little world, and helping them by his own jovial good humour to bear their troubles with a smiling face. And so little Wolf, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... school, I used to wet my socks purposely in order to catch cold, but the cold always avoided me when I wanted it badly. How far away the childish past seems—almost as though it never happened. And was I really the budding novelist in New York? Life has become so stern and scarlet—and so brave. From my window I look out on the English Channel, a cold, grey-green sea, with rain driving across it and a fleet of small craft taking shelter. Over there beyond the curtain of mist lies ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... was too passionate to waste even the moments of his astonishment." This good father, however, does ample justice to the gallantry of the Patriarch Jacob. He offers to serve Laban, seven years for Rachel. "Nothing is too much," cries the venerable novelist, "when one really loves;" and this admirable observation he confirms by the facility with which the obliging Rachel allows Leah for one night to her husband! In this manner the patriarchs are made to speak in the tone of the tenderest ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... romantic aspects of the new land; he, not less honestly, but with a more concentrated and individual view, has pictured some of the monotony of its half-grown society, the gloom of its scenery, and the painful realities of its early penal systems. Reputed only as a novelist, he possessed besides imagination some of the higher qualities of the critical historian. And had his life been prolonged, he might almost have done for Australian city life what Thackeray did for the London of seventy years ago. ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... merits of these productions it would be idle to attempt to speak in our narrow space; but, for a finely graphic paper, (probably the last written previously to the author's death,) on the literary claims of Sir Walter Scott, as a novelist, we may refer the reader to No. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... States, either on the score of its moral or its intellectual power, or for the exertion of that manly independence of thought and action, which ought to characterize the press of a free people. What a prophet would the great wizard novelist of Scotland have been, had the prediction which he put into the mouth of Galeotti Martivalle, the astrologer of Louis the Eleventh, in the romance of Quentin Durward, been written at the period of its date! Louis, who has justly been ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... broken new ground as an historical novelist. His tale is full of stirring action, and will commend itself ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... a modern novelist, compare the case to that of "a practitioner doing his best for a wilful patient, with poor appliances and indifferent nursing." But if He could and ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... courage and inflexible loyalty to the Stuarts," says the novelist, "the Comptons had been heavy sufferers, both in purse and person, during the eventful progress of the civil wars. The Earl of Northampton, the head of the family, and nephew to Sir Henry, the presumed builder of Brambletye, had four sons, officers under him, whereof three charged in the field ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... in the course of time that Cruttendon took to painting orchards; had therefore to live in Kent; and must, one would think, see through apple blossom by this time, since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a novelist; but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in solitude. Then Jinny Carslake, after her affair with Lefanu the American painter, frequented Indian philosophers, and now you find her in pensions in Italy cherishing a little jeweller's box containing ordinary pebbles picked ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... pseudonym of Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, novelist and poet. A considerable portion of his prose works has been recently made accessible to the English reader. Sologub's poetic output includes lyrical pieces of rare beauty. He was born ...
— The Shield • Various
... has ever been an inexhaustible subject for the pens of most classes of writers. The poet, the traveller, and the novelist has each devoted a portion of his time and talents to the mighty ocean; but that part of it which it has fallen to my lot to describe is very different from those portions about which poets have sung with rapture. Here, none ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... A Novelist, whose magic art, Had plumbed ('twas said) the human heart, Whom for the penetrative ken Wherewith he probed the souls of men The Public and the Public's wife Declared synonymous with Life,— Sat idle, being much perplexed What Attitude to study next, Because he ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... biographies of great men, Miss Roden that people nearly always began to expect something of them when they were quite young? As if they were cast in a different mould from the very first. Really great men, I mean not the fashionable pianist or novelist of the hour whose portrait is in every illustrated journal for perhaps two months, and ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... course, the question whether a novelist, who professes to write for the amusement of the young of both sexes, should allow himself to bring upon his stage such a character as that of Carry Brattle? It is not long since,—it is well within the memory of the author,—that the very existence of such a condition ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... A charming novelist, whose writings are brimful of action. Mrs. Southworth is the magnet around which other novelists centre. We publish twenty-seven of her best ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... M. Duclos was an author of good repute as a novelist, and one of the contributors to the "Dictionnaire ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... sense, and scoff at the claim of free-will. Individuals are irresponsible; they are governed by their passions, and the play of human passions is the observer's joy, the artist's material. Stendhal is a novelist after Taine's heart, a faithful painter who is neither touched nor angry, and whom everything amuses—the knave and the adventuress as well as honest men and women, but who has neither faith, nor preference, nor ideal. In him literature is subordinated to natural history, to science. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... aspirations of rising priests in the Church of England. A lawyer does not sin in seeking to be a judge, or in compassing his wishes by all honest means. A young diplomat entertains a fair ambition when he looks forward to be the lord of a first-rate embassy; and a poor novelist, when he attempts to rival Dickens or rise above Fitzjeames, commits no fault, though he may be foolish. Sydney Smith truly said that in these recreant days we cannot expect to find the majesty of St. Paul beneath the cassock of a curate. If we look to our clergymen to be ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... poet (he was also a gifted novelist and short-story writer) de la Mare was praised by T. S. Eliot ("the delicate, invisible web you wove") and by W. H. Auden ("there are no good poems which are only for children"). His technical and linguistic skills are not, as Auden rightly points out, a matter of indifference to ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... to do the running now, Miss Mite. A famous novelist and a successful playwright!" ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... to have full measure, there must be on board a playwright or a novelist, a scientific man, an absconder, a bishop, a transatlantic sharper; a group of nasal people "personally conducted" by a man with a sad, patient face; a lord, or at the very least, a baron and some counts. The other passengers are, ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... be, Mr. Trollope has more recently made his mark as a novelist. "La Beata," an Italian story, published three years ago, is greatly praised by London critics, one strong writer describing it as a "beatific book." The character of the heroine has been drawn with a pathos rare and heart-rending, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... perish with the span of man's life. It is the essence beyond, that which is the motive power, and makes man live, that is now compelled to rouse itself and act. Now is the greatest hour of danger. In the first trial men go mad with fear; of this first trial Bulwer Lytton wrote. No novelist has followed to the second trial, though some of the poets have. Its subtlety and great danger lies in the fact that in the measure of a man's strength is the measure of his chance of passing beyond it or coping with it at all. If he has power enough to awaken that unaccustomed ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... strengthen this, Balboa was officially betrothed to the daughter of Pedrarias—a purely political move this, since Balboa was already united to the dusky daughter of Careta, an aboriginal chief. There is matter for the novelist here and to spare; few situations can be found which hold more possibilities. In this case they led to the death of Balboa, which would probably have happened irrespective of the strange situation ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... which would have greatly startled and probably shocked him, as the father of our English novelists. As an allegorist Bunyan had many predecessors, not a few of whom, dating from early times, had taken the natural allegory of the pilgrimage of human life as the basis of their works. But as a novelist he had no one to show him the way. Bunyan was the first to break ground in a field which has since then been so overabundantly worked that the soil has almost lost its productiveness; while few novels written purely ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... many of the foremost women journalists of the day, and have found orthographic errors in nearly all of them. Of course spelling is not a matter of the highest importance—a certain great English novelist is notoriously incompetent in this respect, and relies upon his printers—but it deserves attention. Bad spelling spoils the appearance of the cleverest article, and raises a prejudice against it in the editorial mind. ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... With everybody and everything modern Mr. MAIS shows an ardent sympathy, but if he is ever to give a comprehensive picture of life he must contrive to be more patient with the old-fashioned. Here his strong personality obtrudes itself too often, and he is inclined to forget that he is a novelist and not a preacher. I could imagine him throwing off a fine comminatory sermon from the text, "Cursed be he who does not admire the genius of Mr. COMPTON MACKENZIE." This homily is drawn from me with reluctance, because ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... might under your auspices be smuggled into the Hatton-garden office for a few moments some morning. If you can further my object I shall be really very greatly obliged to you." The opportunity was found; the magistrate was brought up before the novelist; and shortly after, on some fresh outbreak of intolerable temper, the home-secretary found it an easy and popular step to remove Mr. Laing from ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and, last of all, dandyism. It is a well-known and delightful fact that the most Anglophobe Frenchmen—and Balzac might fairly be classed among them—have always regarded the English dandy with half-jealous, half-awful admiration. Indeed, our novelist, it will be seen, found it necessary to give Marsay English blood. But there is a tradition that this young Don Juan—not such a good fellow as Byron's, nor such a grand seigneur as Moliere's—was partly intended ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... was drank in like wine by the unsuspicious Hortensia. A duke! a poet! a romantic man of genius! What was it made her heart beat so rapidly?—her heart, that had never beat out of time save over the page of the poet or the novelist—or may be in the trance of some beautiful midnight dream, such as love to hover around the pillows of fair maidens, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... and universities, we can see the culture which has been driven like a fugitive away from these institutions. True, this culture is without the erudition of those establishments, but assumes nevertheless the mien of a sovereign; so that, for example, Gutzkow the novelist might be pointed to as the best example of a modern public school boy turned aesthete. Such a degenerate man of culture is a serious matter, and it is a horrifying spectacle for us to see that all our scholarly and journalistic publicity bears the stigma of ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... men, among whom may be mentioned the venerable Emiliano Tejera, the late Archbishop Fernando A. de Merino, Francisco X. Amiama, Francisco Gregorio Billini, Mariano A. Cestero, the historian Jose G. Garcia and the novelist Manuel de J. Galvan, though it is significant that the best productions of some of these appeared after 1880. It is since that year that literature has really flourished. So fecund have Dominican ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... in Cock Robin," and transcendentalism in "Hop O' My Thumb." In short, it has been shown that no man can sit down to write without a very profound design. Thus to authors in general much trouble is spared. A novelist, for example, need have no care of his moral. It is there—that is to say, it is somewhere—and the moral and the critics can take care of themselves. When the proper time arrives, all that the gentleman intended, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... no means so effective as irony, which makes its appeal wholly to the intellect. A good novel, on the contrary, touches the head and the heart both; along with passages which give keen intellectual enjoyment, it offers passages which move its reader's tears. Still, a good novelist without appreciation of irony cannot be imagined, for without the sense of humour which makes irony appreciated, it is impossible to see the objects of this world in their right proportions. Irony, then, which is the main part of a satire, is essential to a good novel, though not necessarily ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... you don't love me, in the novelist's sense of the word, and I am not asking more than you can give. But if you can give me the little now, and more when I have won it—don't curl your lip at me, please: I'm trying to put it as mildly as ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... with the first appearance of the Highland soldier in Canada. That appearance was both interesting and tragic. The stories and legends surrounding the campaigns of these brave men have furnished many themes for the poet and novelist. This chapter can only ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... Christendom. When we use these terms to designate the Spanish race in the sixteenth century, it is not that we are ignorant of Spanish chivalry and colonizing enterprise, of Spanish romance, or of the fact that Spain produced great painters, great dramatists, and one great novelist in the brief period of her glory. We use them deliberately, however, in both cases; because the Papacy at this period committed itself to a policy of immoral, retrograde, and cowardly repression of the most generous of human impulses under the pressure of selfish ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the complicated plot of The Family of Montorio; Maturin's debt to others; his distinguishing gifts revealed in Montorio; the influence of Melmoth the Wanderer on French literature; a survey of Melmoth; Maturin's achievement as a novelist. Pp. 63-93. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... that, when a novelist sets out to write a tale of English country life, the better he is at the job the more sombre is the finished product. Mr. GEORGE STEVENSON is very good indeed at his job; he has sincerity and power, and a certain austere aloofness that will take him far; and the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... when she was leaving the couch of her sick brother, with the gallant Colonel of the Two Hundredth as her attendant, in search of a peculiar shade of red ribbon. But Harding is a man of mercantile regularity of idea, and not even a novelist can move him more rapidly than he chooses. He left Niagara on the Monday following the departure of Bell Crawford and her brother on Saturday, but business may have had more to do with his return to this city than any outsider ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... recovered his health for a time. Chopin declared that the destruction of his relations with Madame Dudevant in 1847 broke up his life. The association of these two artists has provoked a whole literature on the nature of their relations, of which the novelist's Un Hiver a Majorque was the beginning. The last ten years of Chopin's life were a continual struggle with the pulmonary disease to which he succumbed in Paris on the 17th of October 1849. The year before his death he visited England, where he was received with enthusiasm by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... WALTER. The novelist; his treatment of legendary matter, 211; one of the first to bring the story of Tristrem to public notice, 258; continued the story of Tristrem beyond the point at which the Auchinleck ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Fables, imagines a court presided over by the Great White Magistrate. It was a very brief session, and the novelist did not again use the idea. Mr. HUGH CARTON, whose name, we are informed by the wrapper of the book, that new and most trustworthy medium of communication between the candid publisher (unwilling that merit should ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... kind had begun. And this illustrates what I have said of the way in which he anticipated by so many years the kind of work to which the literary world should come. The whole scene between Sebald and Ottima might have been written by a powerful, relentless modern novelist. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... people. A great actress, much sought after in the social world, had lived for years in this square. A famous musician was opposite to her. A baronet, who knew how to furnish, and whose wife gave delightful small parties, was next door but three. A noted novelist had just moved there from a flat in Queen Anne's Mansions. In fact, there was a cachet ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... December a raid on Cuxhaven was made. Seven naval seaplanes attacked a fleet of German cruisers and destroyers lying off Schilling Roads near the German port. The men who thus made history in aviation were Francis E. T. Hewlett, son of the famous novelist, accompanied by seven pilots. A naval force consisting of a light cruiser, a flotilla of destroyers and another of submarines brought up near Helgoland during the morning. When this naval force was first discovered by the lookouts on Helgoland, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... of mind, which was not only not wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist's highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had no greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott. But Scott lived ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... hoped no novelist may attempt it," said Quentin. "She is beautiful beyond description, she will be a princess, and she knew me when I didn't know enough to appreciate her. Her eyes were blue in the old days, and her hair was almost black. Colors still obtain? Then we ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... English effort at winning the heart of this country with sympathy, but also, if I am not offending you, with some humour. I'm not speaking only of your propaganda efforts. You've got, I know, one or two literary gentlemen here—a novelist, I think, and a professor and a journalist. Well, soon you'll find them inefficient, and decide that you must have some commercial gentlemen, and then, disappointed with them, you'll decide for the military... and still the great heart of ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... accidents infinis. Peignez donc les passions, vous aurez les sources immenses dont s'est prive ce grand genie pour etre lu dans toutes les familles de la prude Angleterre.' Does not Thackeray lament that since Fielding no novelist has dared to face the national affectation of prudery? No English author who valued his reputation would venture to write as Anatole France writes, even if he could. Yet I pity the man who does not delight in the genius that created ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age. They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius. The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have it so. Shakespeare ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... imagination to enjoy art as well as to produce it. The producer of the work of art puts the stimuli before you, but you must make the response yourself, and it is an inventive response, not a mere repetition of some response you have often made. The novelist describes a character for you, and you must respond by putting together the items in the description so as to conceive of a character you have never met. The painter groups his figures before you, but you must get the point of the picture for yourself. The musical composer ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... to be ill-treated by "unbelieving Turks;" but the interest and the understanding do not go beyond that. Such is the distinct statement made lately by one of the best observers, Ivan Turgenieff, the novelist, in a conversation with a German writer. As to the revolutionary party in Russia, it has more and more become estranged from the Panslavistic tendency—so much so that at present it stands in direct ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... change of the past century has been effected by the admission of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the faithlessness of Jean Armour, he rends himself in a whirlwind of passion, and seeks sympathy and solace in the love of Mary Campbell. What a situation for a novelist! This is just how the story-teller would have made his jilted hero act; sent him with bleeding heart to seek consolation in a new love. For novelists make a study of the vagaries of love, and know that hearts are caught in ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... routes stretch white beneath the moon. The Afghan, bending knife in hand over a whetstone, and the Chinese coolie knee-deep in his wet paddy-fields, will pause in their work to listen to the sound, uncomprehending, even while the dust is gathering on the labours of the historian and the novelist.... ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... his poems, he stands out strongest and most original as novelist. 'Paul Felton,' his masterpiece in prose, is a powerful study of a diseased condition of mind. In its searching psychologic analysis it stands quite apart from the more or less flaccid production of its day. He indeed could not escape the influence of Charles Brockden Brown, whom he greatly admired, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... naval light literature based upon the times of Nelson can recognize in it characteristics so similar, though evidently softened by advancing civilization and increased contact with the world, as to vouch for the accuracy of the general impression conveyed by the earlier novelist. It is, however, correct only as a general impression, in which, too, allowance must be made for the animus of an author who had grievances to exploit, and whose great aim was to amuse, even if exact truthfulness were sacrificed at the shrine of exaggerated portrayal. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... therein; first number published on April 1, 1836; early numbers not a success; suddenly the book becomes the rage; English literature just then in want of its novelist; Dickens' kingship acknowledged; causes of the book's popularity; its admirable humour, and other excellent qualities; Sam Weller; Mr. Pickwick himself; book read ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... to his lecture on George the Third—by far the best of the series—someone near me yawn, and my soul was filled with horror at what I thought nothing less than an act of sacrilege. I never saw the great novelist except on the occasion of his visit to Newcastle, but to the end of my days it will be a delight thus to have beheld him in the flesh. Dickens I heard read several times, though never in the Lecture Room; yet I cannot say that any of his readings made upon me the ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Henry Lewes, born in London on April 18, 1817, was the grandson of a famous Covent Garden comedian. As an actor, philosopher, novelist, critic, dramatist, journalist, man of science, Lewes played many parts in the life of his time, and some of them he played very well. George Eliot owed him a great deal; he turned her genius away from pure ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Albert, the key of the district. The town of Battleford was besieged by the Indians, but they were successfully kept in check for weeks until the place was relieved. Fort Pitt was evacuated by Inspector Dickens, a son of the great novelist, who succeeded in taking his little force of police into Battleford. Two French missionaries and several white men were ruthlessly murdered at Frog Lake by a band of Crees, and two women were dragged from the bodies of their husbands and carried away to the camp of Big Bear. Happily for ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... not heard and read of Lucien Apleon, 'The Genius of the Age,' sage, savant, artist, sculptor, poet, novelist, a giant in intellect, the Napoleon of commercial capacity, the croesus for wealth, and master of all courts and diplomacy. But I had not heard that you were in England, the last news par' of you which I read, gave you as at that wonderful city, the New Babylon, more ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... Conemaugh River. The bursting of a reservoir, and the ensuing scenes of death and destruction, which are so vividly described in "Put Yourself in His Place," were not the creatures of Mr. Reade's imagination, but actual occurrences. The novelist obtained facts and incidents for one of the most striking chapters in all of his works from the events which followed the breaking of the Dale Dyke embankment at Sheffield, England, in March, 1864, when 238 lives were lost and property valued ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... story conveys a moral lesson and, contrary to custom, the husband has the best of the affair. To prove that my judgment is not too severe, let me quote the following passages from a well-known and popular French novelist, translated by an English littrateur and published ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... portraiture in Victorian fiction; touch after touch of detail is added to the picture with really admirable skill, and Undy lives in the reader's memory as vividly as he must have existed in the imagination of his creator. There are some strong and curious passages in Chapter XLIV, in which the novelist contrasts the lives and fates of Varney, Bill Sykes and Undy Scott; they stir the blood, proving uncontestibly that Undy Scott was as real to Trollope as he is to us: 'The figure of Undy swinging from a gibbet at the broad end of Lombard Street would have an effect. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Bremer, a Swedish novelist, whose "Home or Family Cares and Family Joys" was Hanny's delight. And Irving was ever new and bright. "Salmagundi" always amused her father so much. The recent and delightful stories were ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Kinney and herself, which she prepared largely, was clear and convincing. How different all this from her early life! Mrs. Jackson had become more than poet and novelist; even the leader of an oppressed people. At once, in the winter of 1883, she began to write her wonderfully graphic and tender Ramona, and into this, she said, "I put my heart and soul." The book ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... not thought it disgraceful to once more justify its title to be called the "Saturday Reviler." This time it is not to break upon the wheel some poor butterfly of a lady traveller or novelist, but to scoff at an aged painter of the highest repute—Mr. Herbert—upon his retirement to the rank of "Honorary Academician," after a career such as few, if any, painters living can boast. This it pleases the "Reviler" to congratulate ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... of bothering her ancient head about whose house she was seen at, was extremely pleased with her entertainment. She wagged her old head—white now, quite frankly, after many years of essays in difficult tints—whispered to her novelist, and made ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... charming narrative, I, poor waif and stray, felt a strong personal regard for the great novelist as I read the cheery story in which he sets forth how, calling at the house on the afternoon before Christmas-day, he obtained permission to give a Christmas feast to the six Poor Travellers; how he ordered the materials for the feast to be sent in from his own ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... phenomenon, after moralizing a little on the crass ignorance of Frenchmen in respect to our literature, goes on to write like an ignoramus himself, on Mme. Charles Reybaud, encouraging that pure budding novelist, who is in fact a hack writer of romances third and fourth rate, of questionable purity enough, too. It does certainly appear wonderful that we should not sufficiently stand abreast here in Europe, to justify and necessitate the establishment of ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... fact of her having, at an age when impressions are strongest, and most lasting, mixed freely and on equal terms with the upper classes of society, was a point in her education not without its favorable action on her afterwards as a novelist. Despite her firm republican sympathies, emphatic disdain for mere rank and wealth, and her small mercy for the foibles of the fashionable world, she can enter into its spirit, paint its allurements without exaggeration, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... opened his eyes into a world in which he was to see and to imagine such extraordinary things. If this were the case, I would willingly have crossed its threshold; not for the sake of any relic of the great novelist which it may possibly contain, nor even for that of any mystic virtue which may be supposed to reside within its walls, but simply because to look at those four modest walls can hardly fail to give one a ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report—the native novelist. This expert is so rare that the most populous country can never have fifteen conspicuously and confessedly competent ones in stock at one time. This native specialist is not qualified to begin work until he has been absorbing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the novelist, herself a writer of note, sat dry eyed in the saloon, telling her friends that she had given up hope for her husband. She joined with the rest in inquiries as to the chances of rescue by another ship, and no one told her what ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... has always been a formidable rival to the novelist, insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and fantastic romance, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... performance, by the famous Kikugoro and his company, of the Botan-Doro, or "Peony-Lantern." This weird play, of which the scenes are laid in the middle of the last century, is the dramatization of a romance by the novelist Encho, written in colloquial Japanese, and purely Japanese in local color, though inspired by a Chinese tale. I went to see the play; and Kikugoro made me familiar with a new variety of the pleasure of fear. "Why not give English readers the ghostly ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the house where they say the novelist was born. A plain, whitewashed, stone structure, built two hundred years ago; two stories, the upper chambers low, with gable-windows; a little garden at the side bright with flowers, where sweet marjoram vied with onions and beets; all spoke of humble thrift ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... in the world, the wars in Bohemia, in France, and in Turkey, added a certain, interest to English life because they furnished to the newspapers matter more exciting than any novelist could produce, and in this way gratified the taste for sensation which had been acquired both by rich and poor. That these events meant anything in particular to the British nation was not likely to be realised while that nation ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... these, M. Dumas, a dramatist very ingenious in the construction of plots, and one who tells a story admirably, has travelled quite in character. There is a dramatic air thrown over all his proceedings, things happen as pat as if they had been rehearsed, and he blends the novelist and tourist together after a very bold and original fashion. It is a new method of writing travels that he has hit upon, and we recommend it to the notice of our countrymen or countrywomen, who start from home with the fixed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the subject matter indicated by the title of this book; to remind them in a way of what already exists to-day of the London Dickens knew, as well as of the changes which have taken place since the novelist's time. ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... into the hands of Charles J. Wister, Junior, an artist, writer and Friend of high repute, who, like his father, was for many years identified with Germantown Academy. On his death in 1910 Grumblethorpe was shared by his nephews, Owen Wister, the novelist, and Alexander W. Wister, neither of ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... obvious. Feeling that his mission was not merely to pull down, but to build up, he spoke with the vigour of a dogmatist, not with the coldness of a critic. To a burning eloquence and native wit he united the picturesque power of the novelist or the artist. But his vigour of style was deformed by a power of sarcasm which often invested the most sacred subjects with caricature and vulgarity; a boundless malignity against supposed errors. How different is the tone ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... thoughtful work produced, an army of cultivated workers, a great demand, an equally great supply, a very high average of merit—and yet so little of the very first rank. For the first time in the present century, English literature is without a single living novelist of world-wide reputation. The nineteenth century opened with Castle Rackrent and the admirably original tales of Maria Edgeworth. Jane Austen followed in the same field. And since Waverley appeared, in 1814, we have ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... knew nothing of them himself, may be said to have led me back to them. It seems odd, and yet I am not the first nor the fiftieth who has left Thrums at sunrise to seek the life-work that was all the time awaiting him at home. And we seldom sally forth a second time. I had always meant to be a novelist, but London, I thought, was ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... some writers say the thickest, in the English language; James Whistleton Potts, the eminent portraitist, whose limnings of his patients have won him a high place among the caricaturists of the age, Robert Dozyphrase, the expatriated American novelist, now of London, whose latest volume of sketches, entitled Intricacies, has been equally the delight of his followers and the despair of students of the occult; and, what is more to the purpose of our story, Major-General ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... you, and one without arms, and you are in a corner, and there are ten pistols pointing at you a few feet away, and as many sabres ready to be drawn, I say no power less remarkable than that of God or a novelist can bring you out of your difficulty. You have your choice of two evils—surrender or be cut to pieces. We had neither of us any longing to be slashed with steel and bored with bullets, and to no end but a ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... To fill a novel with typical characters only, or with merely strange and uncommon people, would render the book unreal and improbable, and would very likely destroy the interest. In my opinion, the duty of the novelist is to seek out points of interest and instruction even in ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... my mind to become a novelist, I naturally studied the productions of my predecessors, and found out, I assure you, in a very brief period of time, the little tricks of the trade. As I do not wish to have the business flooded with ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... particularly weak, especially the women, far more of whom than men try their hand at short stories and novels, and who are generally without that preliminary experience in journalism which most of the male writers have undergone. It is not enough for a novelist to "know life"; he must also know the literary aspect of life, must have the imaginative power to select and adapt actual experiences artistically. Young women who write are prone to record things "just as they happened." This ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... eye to the great job I had mentioned to them— they had secretly set their hearts on supplying the right essence for my pictorial vindication of our fine novelist. They knew that for this undertaking I should want no costume—effects, none of the frippery of past ages—that it was a case in which everything would be contemporary and satirical and presumably genteel. If I could work them into it their future would be assured, for the labour would ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... oui. Il sera parmi nous," said the novelist, as she hurried him away. "Moi aussi," she added to herself, "je me promets un beau plaisir en faisant la connaissance de ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... some of the phases of New England character. Ware's historical novels were popular in their day, and are now worth going back to by modern readers, and especially by those who do not insist upon having their romances hot from the press. Catherine M. Sedgwick is another novelist worth returning to by modern readers, and especially by those who would know of New England life in the early part of the nineteenth century. She became an ardent Unitarian, and her biography gives interesting glimpses of the early struggles ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift. Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, for instance, in combining extravagant fancy with ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... some later novels of indifferent merit," says a critic in "Chambers' Encyclopaedia." "Has anyone ever been able to write with free and genuine appreciation of even the later novels?" asks or echoes a lady, Miss Grace Toplis, writing on Jefferies. "In brief, he was an essayist and not a novelist at all," says Mr. Henry Salt. "It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... those moments, Phil, I was full of aspiration to do those things for which nature had not fitted me, and to the extent that I recognized my inability to do those things I failed to be content. I should have liked to be a great writer, a poet, a great dramatist, a novelist—a little of everything in the literary world. I should have liked to know Shakespeare, to have been the friend of Milton; and when I came out of my dreams it made me unhappy to think that such I ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... common interest, he framed that which is too famous, shall I say, or rather too notorious as the Anglo-Turkish Convention. Gentlemen, it is said, and said truly, that truth beats fiction; that what happens in fact from time to time is of a character so daring, so strange, that if the novelist were to imagine it and to put it upon his pages, the whole world would reject it from its improbability. And that is the case of the Anglo-Turkish Convention. For who would have believed it possible that we should assert before the world the principle that Europe only could deal with the affairs ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... Ground-work which he raises his Play upon. In general we are to take Notice, that as History ran very low in his Days, most of his Plays are founded upon some old wretched Chronicler, or some empty Italian Novelist; but the more base and mean were his Materials, so much more ought we to admire His Skill, Who has been able to work up his Pieces to such Sublimity from such low Originals. Had he had the Advantages ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... Clawson and Townsend; among the latter are Harry Riccard, the big-hearted English mountaineer (though once he wore white kids and swallow-tails in Regent Street, and in boyhood went to school with Miss Edgeworth, the novelist), the daring explorer Rood, from Wisconsin; th e Rev. James McCormick, missionary, who distributes pasteboard tracts among the Bannock miners; and the pleasing child of gore, Captain D. B. Stover, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... in the dark and dismal night, the traveller proceeded without dismay to the gibbet, and stood under it. Says Ainsworth, the Lancashire novelist and poet, ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... the day of the weekly market, and there met with friends and patrons from different parts of the district. The late Duke of Roxburghe, Sir Walter Scott, Mr Baillie of Jerviswoode, Mr John Gibson Lockhart, and Mr G. P. R. James, the novelist, who sometimes resided in the neighbourhood, and other persons of rank or literary eminence, extended towards him countenance ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... pursuit in the world is studying character. I believe I was meant to be a novelist; people fascinate me—until I know them thoroughly. Percy and the doctor form a most engaging contrast. You always know at any moment what that nice young man is thinking about; he is written like a primer in big type and one-syllable words. But the doctor! He might as well be written ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... proof. He urged me to take it back and make a longer story out of the materials, and he expressed great confidence in the success of such a story. Yielding to his suggestion, I began to write this novel from week to week as it appeared in the paper, and thus found myself involved in the career of a novelist, which had up to that time formed no part of my plan of life. In my inexperience I worked at a white-heat, completing the book in ten weeks. Long before these weeks of eager toil were over, it was a question among my friends ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... punishment. The mill of antiquity was like a convict-prison. "There," says Plautus, "moan the wicked slaves who are fed on polenta; there resound the noise of whips and the clanking of chains." Three centuries later, in the second century, Apuleius the novelist, depicts the interior of a mill as follows: "Gods! what poor shrunken up men! with white skin striped with blows of the whip, ... they wear only the shreds of a tunic; bent forward, head shaved, the feet held in a chain, the body deformed ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... to be an abundance of young men, mostly rather weedy-looking, but with one or two well-grown ones who should have been fighting. The names of some of them Jimson mentioned with awe. An unwholesome youth was Aronson, the great novelist; a sturdy, bristling fellow with a fierce moustache was Letchford, the celebrated leader-writer of the Critic. Several were pointed out to me as artists who had gone one better than anybody else, and a vast billowy creature was described as the leader of the new Orientalism in England. I noticed ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... verdict which posterity almost at once, and with ever-increasing suffrage of the best judges as time went on, was about to pass not merely upon this particular book, but upon his whole genius and his whole production as a novelist. His work in other kinds is of a very different order of excellence. It is sufficiently interesting at times in itself; and always more than sufficiently interesting as his; for which reasons, as well as for the further one that ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... humorist. That was the real character of the man. He tried many things, and he produced much; but the root of him was that he was a humorous thinker. He did not write first-rate plays, or first-rate novels, rich as he was in the elements of playwright and novelist. He was not an artist. But he had a rare and original eye and soul,—and in a peculiar way he could pour out himself. In short, to be an Essayist was the bent of his nature and genius. English literature is rich in such men,—in men whose works are cherished for the individuality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... since the days when she and her sister, Lady Lyttelton, were "the beautiful Miss Glynnes." Robert Lowe, not yet Lord Sherbrooke, was a celebrity who might often be seen in Society,—a noteworthy figure with his ruddy face, snow-white hair, and purblind gaze. The first Lord Lytton—Bulwer-Lytton, the novelist—was dead before I came to London; but his brilliant son, "Owen Meredith," in the intervals of official employment abroad, was an interesting figure in Society; curled and oiled and decorated, with a ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... in his. I then fancied that I could paint with more vividness the ideas and the feelings of this student by contrasting them with an earthly love; and this was the origin of "Pepita Ximenez." Thus, when it was farthest from my thoughts, did I become a novelist. My novel had, therefore, the freshness and ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... belong to the same constellation. Most of them shed their luster over the stern realities of life: a few glittered in the firmament of fiction. It matters little. A great romance is a portrait of humanity, painted by a master-hand. When the novelist employs the majestic words of revelation to transfigure the lives of his characters, he does so because, in actual experience, he finds those selfsame words indelibly engraven upon the souls of men. And, after all, ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... knots in a net; these can not be thrown together haphazard, lest the big fish slip through. At the bottom of the net is a small steel ring, and here the many threads and the many knots finally meet. Forbes and Haggerty (who, by the way, thinks I'm a huge joke as a novelist) and the young man named Webb recounted this tale to me by threads and knots. The ring was of Kitty Killigrew, for Kitty Killigrew, by Kitty Killigrew, ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... sensible novelist hesitate? Does a shoe-maker depreciate leather? Would you saw off the tree-branch you sit on? Now, on this subject, anybody's opinion (full-grown) is as good as another's. Let the footman bring down word that love is the drawing-room topic, and the cook will cry out, "What do they know more ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... about Mr. ARTHUR COMPTON-RICKETT as a novelist, it can at least be urged for him that he displays no undue apprehension of the too-facile laugh. For example, the humorous possibilities (or perils) in the plot of The Shadow of Stephen Wade (JENKINS) might well have daunted a writer of more experience. Stephen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... afterwards externalised. This is equally true when he is exercising his imagination; the painter who forms a conception of his future picture builds it up out of the matter of his mental body, and then projects it into space in front of him, keeps it before his mind's eye, and copies it. The novelist in the same way builds images of his character in mental matter, and by the exercise of his will moves these puppets from one position or grouping to another, so that the plot of his story is literally acted out before him. ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... two advisedly: for the span of man's active life is short and such haunting fancies are, of their essence, solitary. As a matter of fact, indeed, the majority of a novelist's creations belong to another class, must of necessity (if he be a prolific creator) find their conception in more sudden impulses. The great family of the "children of his brain" must be born of inspirations ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... "Why is it," the novelist continued speculatively, "that, whenever we take another man's wife out, we think it ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Scott, poet and novelist, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, five years before the Declaration of Independence in America. Unlike most little Scotch boys, he was not sturdy and robust, and in his second year, a lameness appeared that never entirely left him. Being frail and delicate, he received the most tender care from ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... before the public is Edward Milton Royle's "Squawman," recently at Wallack's Theatre. The dramatist has caught his picture just in the nick of time, just before the facts of life in the Indian Territory are passing away. He has preserved the picture for us as George W. Cable, the novelist, preserved pictures of Creole life of old New Orleans, made ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... that if one seeks to know the world exactly as it is, the theatre does not furnish the means whereby one can pursue the study. A far better opportunity for knowing the private life of a people is available through the medium of its great novels. The novelist deals with each person as an individual. He speaks to his reader at an hour when the mind is disengaged from worldly affairs, and he can add without restraint every detail that seems needful to him to complete the rounding ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the precise method of approach. John Barrymore has mastered the evasive subtlety therein, which makes him one of our greatest artists. The future will surely wait for his riper contributions, and we may think of him as one of our foremost artists, among the few, "one of a small band," as the great novelist once said ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... drama, the Philippine revolution, one man of the purest and noblest character stands out pre-eminently—Jose Rizal—poet, artist, philologue, novelist, above all, patriot; his influence might have changed the whole course of events in the islands, had not a blind and stupid policy brought about the crime ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... with Boswell's Johnson and Lockhart's Scott. As far as mere readers are concerned, it may indeed claim its hundreds as against the tens of intrinsically more important rivals. There are obvious reasons for this success. Mrs. Gaskell was herself a popular novelist, who commanded a very wide audience, and Cranford, at least, has taken a place among the classics of our literature. She brought to bear upon the biography of Charlotte Bronte all those literary gifts which had made the charm of her seven volumes of romance. And these gifts were employed upon ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... novelist would attribute the deeper emotions to a child like that. What does she know about anything? Love isn't a mere emotion, either—that is all fol-de-rol and fizzle!—it's the false basis of modern romance. Love is reason—not a nervous phenomenon. Love is a sane passion, founded on a basic knowledge ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Martie smiled bewilderedly at the novelist; she knew that name! He was a writer with twenty books to his credit. He had a ranch somewhere in California; he spent his winters there. Some hazy recollection ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... January 1688, but, as is believed, had been begun nearly thirty years earlier, and slowly finished, the final revision and arrangement dating from 1686 and 1687. The book, like so many of the world's masterpieces, is short, and a fashionable novelist of to-day could scribble in a fortnight as many words as it contains. But there is not a careless phrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in the range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... on the lower reaches of the moor. Some of the ladies, indeed, had not yet appeared downstairs; a sleepy heat reigned over the valley with its winding stream, and veiled the distant hills. Meadows's companion, Ralph Barrow, a young novelist of promise, had gone fast asleep on the grass; Meadows was drowsing over his book; the dogs slept on the terrace steps; and in the summer silence the murmur of the river far below stole up the hill on which the house stood, and its ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... terrible! I can scarcely realize that all you have told me can be fact. It sounds incredible, monstrous. Why, it is as if we lived in a wild land, and another century. No novelist could conceive of such a horrible condition. There were pirates along this coast once—I have read of them—but now, in our age of the world, to even dream of such a state of affairs would be madness. What can it mean? Have ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... woman in his books. In short, his life was vehemently pro-George-Meredith, while his books were vehemently anti-George-Meredith. He knew himself more thoroughly, so far as we can discover from his books, than any other English novelist ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... is often abbreviated, elliptical, and unregardful of book rules. Constructions like the following are not uncommon in his prose: "As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmed all Europe.... As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth new powers from Mr. Liston's face." Lectures on the English Poets, "On Swift, Young," etc., ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Egg-beater!" the blithe young novelist to whom Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... there be such, I would dearly like to know what the metaphysic of their position is, and how they square it with any idea of humanity or social life. Meantime, all this is surmise, and I, as a novelist, have a notoriously flighty imagination, and am content to leave ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... lingering boyishness in him which endeared him to Ann always led him to open his Sabbath reading in this fashion. Grey-headed though he was, he still retained both in art and in real life a taste for the slapstick. No one had ever known the pure pleasure it had given him when Raymond Green, his wife's novelist protege, had tripped over a loose stair-rod one morning and ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... came across this volume, have been at a loss to recommend any popular life of England's most popular novelist as being really satisfactory."—Athenaeum. ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... New York disintegrate, and Arthur's explanation sounded like some wild dream of an imaginative novelist. Not one person in all the gathering could actually realize that his home might yet be waiting for him, though at the same time he felt a pathetic anxiety for the welfare ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... and the wayward, was attracted hither and thither are also well drawn; but here Mr. MAIS shows his present limitations. Nevertheless I feel sure that he has within him the qualities that go to make a great novelist, and that if he will free himself from certain marked prejudices his future lies straight and clear ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... authors of philosophical dialogues are, in fact, better evidences of the growing love of nature than the poets. The novelist Bandello, for example, observes rigorously the rules of his department of literature; he gives us in his novels themselves not a word more than is necessary on the natural scenery amid which the action of his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the reader that the detective of the novelist cannot be foiled or turned aside by false scents from the unerring pursuit of his lawful prey. If by malice prepense Javert or Cuff is temporarily beguiled, it is simply for the purpose of showing that the writer himself ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... and made, people thought, a somewhat caustic return for the hospitable welcome; Harriet Martineau had made a tour, and gone home rather favourably impressed; and the winter before the intellectual circle—and it was getting to be quite notable—had honoured the Swedish novelist, Frederica Bremer, and been really charmed by her unaffected sweetness. If they were not quite ready to take up her theories for the advancement of women, they fell to reading the delightful "Neighbours" and "Home." And now there was to be another ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... had been written about in the newspapers of two hemispheres—laid down her American Squeezer pen, and sighed. It was an autumn day, nipping and melancholy, full of the rustle of dying leaves and the faint sound of muffin bells, and Belgrave Square looked sad even to the great female novelist who had written her way into a mansion there. Fog hung about with the policeman on the pavement. The passing motor cars were like shadows. Their stertorous pantings sounded to Mrs. Greyne's ears like the asthma of dying monsters. She sighed again, and murmured in a ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... will always be known, however, as the great novelist of the seventeenth century. Two novels, two stories, two historical works, and her memoirs, make up her literary budget. M. d'Haussonville claims that her memoirs of the court of France are not reliable, because she was so often ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... of his yarns. On being offered a moiety of the profits, he observed that he had no objection to these, but that he entirely declined to be responsible for any share of the expenses. Would that all authors were as sagacious, for then the amateur novelist and the minor poet would ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... 1800 Miss Edgeworth, thirty-three years old, began her independent career as a novelist with "Castle Rackrent;" and from that time on, work followed work in illustration of the power of a woman of genius to associate quick wit and quick feeling with sound sense and a good reason for speaking. Sir Walter Scott in his frank way declared that he received ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth |
