"Novelist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... United States he met both Dickens and Thackeray. His friendship with Dickens was begun by a letter which Irving wrote to the great novelist, enthusiastically praising his work. At once Dickens replied in a long letter, fairly bubbling over with delight and friendship. Here ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... 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 knew that crime was ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... and again, for the same frank simplicity that brings us nearer than books usually bring us to a living knowledge of some features of a bygone time; and yet again, because it helps us a little to come near to Milton in his daily life. He would be a good novelist who could invent as pleasant a book as this unaffected record of a quiet life touched by ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... 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 ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... and thumbed it over very tenderly; for you must know that I am particularly attached to that little volume. I can hardly realize that nearly half a century has elapsed since Yseult Hardynge and I parted. She was such a creature as the great novelist himself would have chosen for a heroine; she had the beauty and the wit of those Florentine ladies who flourished in the fourteenth century, and whose graces of body and mind have been immortalized by Boccaccio. Her eyes, as I particularly ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... 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 ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... have a private talk in the library. They did not make their appearance until the afternoon was well advanced, and when they did, the drawing-room was full of people, for it was Miss Carr's "At home" day, and the presence of Austin Bertrand, the celebrated novelist, brought together even more ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sister of Captain Marryat, the famous novelist—was a maiden lady of large means. She had nursed her brother through the illness that ended in his death, and had been living with her mother at Wimbledon Park. On her mother's death she looked round for work which would make her useful in the world, and finding that ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... Thomas, speaking of a modern novel, "it certainly does seem strange; but the novelist was right. ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... are thrown on to a flat board, is far more free than sculpture, in which their solidity is preserved. It is by giving up these identities that art gains true strength. And so in the case of novels as compared with the stage. Continuous narration is the flat board on to which the novelist throws everything. And from this there results for him a great loss of vividness, but a great compensating gain in his power over the subject; so that he can now subordinate one thing to another in importance, and introduce all manner of very subtle ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chances London life might have given him of meeting the distinguished novelist; a danger, however, that disappeared with Vereker's leaving England for an indefinite absence, as the newspapers announced—going to the south for motives connected with the health of his wife, which had long kept her in retirement. A year—more than ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... have engaged the great and amiable novelist in conversation I don't know; but at this point, having listened to him for more than an hour and a half, I rose ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... really avoided the chances London life might have given him of meeting the distinguished novelist; a danger however that disappeared with Vereker's leaving England for an indefinite absence, as the newspapers announced—going to the south for motives connected with the health of his wife, which had long kept her in retirement. A year—more than a year—had elapsed since the ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Boccaccio was a novelist, a child Of fancy and of fiction at the best! This the urbane librarian said, and smiled Incredulous, as at some ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... how the Bishop arranges the matter. What the novelist does with the puppets of his imagination, the Bishop does with real beings of flesh and blood. As a rational being he cannot leave things to chance. Besides this, he must arrange the matter before the young man takes orders, because, by the rules of the Church, the marriage ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... history of London as a whole. These he finished up to the end of the eighteenth century, and they form a record of the great city practically unique, and exceptionally interesting, compiled by one who had the qualities both of novelist and historian, and who knew how to make the dry bones live. The volume on the eighteenth century, which Sir Walter called a "very big chapter indeed, and particularly interesting," will shortly be issued by Messrs. A. and C. Black, who had undertaken the publication ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... commanding spirit of this generation, gained only a few disciples, and was entirely misunderstood and neglected by contemporary criticism. Another prosperous writer, to whom I have already alluded, George Eliot, enjoyed enormous popularity in her lifetime, while the most strenuous and passionate novelist of her period, Charles Reade, was entirely distanced by her in the immediate race for Fame. In Literature, as in all things, manners and costume are most important; the hall-mark of contemporary success is perfect Respectability. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... out that the novelist did not really expect an answer or an opinion, but was at such times thinking aloud. The mental process, however, was immensely interesting, particularly when Stevenson would ask Bok to hand him a book on words lying on an adjacent table. "So hard to find just the right word," ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... purpose, we find, in the romance of "Perceforet," that, after a repast, whilst the tables were being removed, everything was prepared for a ball, and that although the knights made no change in their accoutrements, yet the ladies went and made fresh toilettes. "Then," says the old novelist, "the young knights and the young ladies began to play their instruments and to have the dance." From this custom may be traced the origin of the ancient Gallic proverb, "Apres la panse vient la danse" ("After the ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... nominally a notice of two works, one on Russia, the other "A Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great." It is, however, a narrative rather than a criticism, a rapid, continuous, brilliant, almost dramatic narrative. If there had been any question as to whether the young novelist who had missed his first mark had in him the elements which might give him success as an author, this essay would have settled the question. It shows throughout that the writer has made a thorough study of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... make her guilty," said the novelist; "and she would marry a man who believed in her innocence, and he wouldn't care two pins when she told him the truth in the last chapter, and they would live happily ever afterwards. Nobody would touch the serial rights. But that would ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... a man of a very different sort. A novelist undoubtedly as skilful as Blasco and a good deal more profound, he lacks the quality of enthusiasm and thus makes a more restricted appeal. In place of gaudy certainties he offers disconcerting questionings; in place of a neat and well-rounded body of doctrine he puts forward a sort of generalized ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... 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 ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... the case, it was impossible to decline this request. I wrote to say that time should be made, and the notes were forwarded to me at Robin Hood's Bay. I began by reading carefully and twice over, so as to get a grip of the story and the novelist's intention, the part that had already appeared, and the proofs so far as the author had gone. I then turned to the notes. I found that these were not merely notes such as I expected—simple indications of the plot and the development of ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... horrible 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 ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... vain did lie insult, abuse, and malign all his acquaintances. In vain did he father upon them all the rascality and villany he could think of; he lied against them with a force and originality that would have made many a modern novelist blush for want of invention—but all to no purpose. The world for once became astonishingly Christian; it paid back all his efforts to excite its resentment with the purest of charity; when Neal struck it on the one cheek, it meekly turned unto him the other. ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... is the great authority on Mithra, and his Mysteries of Mithra and Oriental Religions trace the origin and influence of that cult with accuracy, insight, and charm. W.W. Reade, brother of Charles Reade the novelist, left a study of The Veil of Isis, or Mysteries of the Druids, finding in the vestiges of Druidism "the Emblems ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... was definitely constructed for theatrical effect, was openly avowed by Marion Crawford. At the beginning of the French version made for Mme. Bernhardt, he placed material that showed his intention of dealing with fact in the manner of a novelist, and regardless of the sweetness of Dante. To him, Concordia is fourteen, since he considers 1289 as the date of the tragedy, and, with his details from Boccaccio's commentary, he has coarsened Francesca, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... is coming everybody's way," said Malcourt gaily—"like the last chapter of a bally novel—the old-fashioned kind, Billy, where Nemesis gets busy with a gun and kind Providence hitches 'em up in ever-after blocks of two. It takes a rotten novelist to use a gun on his villains! It's never done in decent literature—never done ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... one of his 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 shine unobserved) and ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... night, from night till morning, Charlotte Bronte in the Parsonage thought of nothing but of getting married, that her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the casual visitor. The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability of Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her sister novelist. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... no longer unfamiliar in the ear of any well-read man or woman. But at the hour of her death she had published but one book, and that book had found but two reviewers in Europe. One of these, M. Andre Theuriet, the well-known poet and novelist, gave the "Sheaf gleaned in French Fields" adequate praise in the "Revue des Deux Mondes"; but the other, the writer of the present notice, has a melancholy satisfaction in having been a little earlier still in sounding the only note of welcome which reached ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... publisher; "very pretty, indeed, and very original; beats Scott hollow, and Percy too: but, sir, the day for these things is gone by; nobody at present cares for Percy, nor for Scott, either, save as a novelist; sorry to discourage merit, sir, but what can I do? What ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... of London!" That is William Dean Howells' impression of Chelsea. And, if you would perceive rightly the soul of Chelsea, you must view it through the pearl-grey haze of just such a temperament as that of the suave American novelist. If you have not that temperament, then Chelsea is not for you; try Hampstead or ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... Henry Somerset Walpole, D.D., Bishop of Edinburgh since 1910, had been sent in 1882 to Auckland as Incumbent of St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral, and the same ecclesiastical fates which took charge of Hugh Seymour Walpole's birthplace provided that, at the age of five, the immature novelist should be transferred to New York. Dr. Walpole spent the next seven years in imparting to students of the General Theological Seminary, New York, their knowledge of Dogmatic Theology. Hugh Seymour Walpole spent the seven years in attaining the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... circle and amongst my friends is familiarly referred to as the Nigger, remains very precious to me. For the book written round him is not the sort of thing that can be attempted more than once in a life-time. It is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, I am willing to stand or fall. Its pages are the tribute of my unalterable and profound affection for the ships, the seamen, the winds and the great sea—the moulders ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... obligations to the artist; through him our perception of and acquaintance with our race, its individuality and career, its phases and aspects, is indefinitely enlarged. "The greatest benefit," says a late writer, "we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying our experience and extending our contact with our fellow-creatures beyond the bounds of our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... success of this much loved American novelist. It is a powerful portrayal of a young clergyman's attempt to win his beautiful wife to ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... much-esteemed in England, is equally well known to be a kind of monarch in Hungary. Whatever novelist shall write the "Troubles of rank and riches," should take the prince for his hero. He has eight or nine princely mansions scattered over the empire, and in each of them it is expected, by his subjects of the soil, that his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... attired in savage finery of paint and feathers; no sculptor's ideal form, or novelist's heroic countenance; but a mild-looking person, in an old shooting jacket and red flannel shirt, with a straw hat shading his pale coppery complexion. He wield a tomahawk or march on a war trail! Never. And where was the grim taciturnity of his forefathers? ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... 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, and indicate its shortcomings with none of that asperity ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... round the table at the people and wondered about them. She had heard of the barrister and the novelist, and the peer's name had a familiar sound that suggested something unusual, though she could not quite remember what it was. It might be pictures, or the north pole, or the divorce court, or a new idiot asylum; it would never matter much. The new acquaintances ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... has 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 artists upon as "good news," without a word or a ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... cholera differs from that of a wasp or a viper. The life of the insect and serpent deserves, or at least permits, our thoughts; not so, the stages of agony in the fury-driven hound. There is some excuse, indeed, for the pathologic labour of the modern novelist in the fact that he cannot easily, in a city population, find a healthy mind to vivisect: but the greater part of such amateur surgery is the struggle, in an epoch of wild literary competition, to obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and colour in healthy fruit, be it sweet ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... many people already know Mr. Hagedorn through his verse. Faces in the Dawn will, however, be their introduction to him as a novelist. The same qualities that have served to raise his poetry above the common level help to distinguish this story of a German village. The theme of the book is the transformation that was wrought in the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... taken at this time, and the most far-reaching in its consequences, was the action of Alexander Galt in Canada. Galt possessed a strong and independent mind. The youngest son of John Galt, the Scottish novelist, he had come across the ocean in the service of the British American Land Company, and had settled at Sherbrooke in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada. Though personally influential and respected, he ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... we came across this volume, have been at a loss to recommend any popular life of England's most popular novelist ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... their own household may be willing to grant, frequently rival and sometimes surpass the older compositions, in respect at least of punctuation, which is no small glory. Fully to understand the important services that flies perform to literature it is only necessary to lay a page of some popular novelist alongside a saucer of cream-and-molasses in a sunny room and observe "how the wit brightens and the style refines" in accurate proportion to the duration ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... that he expected to become a great man, and, though he had not quite decided upon the nature of his career,—saving, of course, the makeshift of journalism,—it was not unlikely that he would elect to be a novelist ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... you don't feel so far removed from this in your Yorkshire desert that it has no interest for you, but I know how devoted you are to Peter and one doesn't want to see the boy turned into the society novelist creature—the kind of creature, God forgive me, that brother Percival is certain to become. You'll probably say when you read this that I am trying to drag out all the morbid side of Peter and make him the ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... several columns to give any adequate idea of the superb way in which the Dutch novelist has developed his theme and wrought out one of the most impressive stories of the period.... It belongs to the small class of novels which one can not afford to ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... wish to proclaim it. The women by whom Geoffrey, the weak 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... Moscow, and a gloomy one it was. From an historical and picturesque point of view the city is intensely interesting, but otherwise it is a dull, dreary place. Russian cities, not excepting Petersburg, generally are, although the English novelist generally depicts them as oases of luxurious splendour, where love and Nihilism meet one at every turn, and where palaces, diamonds and silver sleigh-bells play an important part, to say nothing of that journalistic trump card, the Secret Police! I wish one of these ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... spokesman of the committee, had to say to them, but it was common rumor that their expedition had been crowned by extraordinary success.' (Applause.) 'Apparently the age of romance was not dead, and there was common ground upon which the wildest imaginings of the novelist could meet the actual scientific investigations of the searcher for truth. He would only add, before he sat down, that he rejoiced—and all of them would rejoice—that these gentlemen had returned safe and sound from their difficult and dangerous task, for it ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the black shadow of the most poetical of human feelings, is avoided by the gentle artist. He hardly ever describes it, only alluding to it cursorily. But there is no novelist who gives so much room to the pure, crystalline, eternally youthful feeling of love. We may say that the description of love is Turgenev's speciality. What Francesco Petrarca did for one kind of love—the romantic, artificial, hot-house love of the times of chivalry—Turgenev ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... from Novel to Drama.—When Realidad was performed, Galds was the most popular novelist in Spain, the peer of any in his own generation, and the master of the younger men of letters. He was known as a radical, an anti-clerical, who exercised a powerful influence upon the thought of his nation, but, above all, as a marvelous creator of fictional characters. ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... Mazzini's Duties of Man, and other congenial documents, to break up the insular confines in which they had been reared and to enlarge their new horizon. Afterwards they went on to read Tolstoi, and Turgenev's powerful and antipathetic fellow-novelist, Dostoievsky, and many other Russian writers: but as he was the greatest artist of them all, his individual revelation of his country's predicament did not lose its effect. Writing in prose he achieved a style of his own which went ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... Lady Elliston's country house that Amabel first met Paul Quentin. He was a daring young novelist who was being made much of during those years; for at that still somewhat guileless time to be daring had been to be original. His books had power and beauty, and he had power and beauty, fierce, dreaming eyes and an intuitive, sudden smile. ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Talleyrand had sat at their hospitable board: Louis Philippe d'Orleans,—supported for several years by Gouverneur Morris,—the Duc de Montpensier, the Duke of Kent, John Singleton Copley, subsequently, so eminent as jurist and statesman, Kosciusko, Count Niemcewicz, the novelist, poet, dramatist, and historian, were but a few. All travellers of distinction brought letters to Hamilton, for, not excepting Washington, he was to Europeans the most prosilient of Americans. If there had been little decrease of hard work during these ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... operettas have flourished to a considerable degree. Mary Grant Carmichael met with some success through her operetta, "The Snow Queen," but like Miss Smyth gave the world a more important work in the shape of a mass. Ethel Harraden, sister of the novelist, had her opera, "The Taboo," brought out at the Trafalgar Square Theatre, London, with excellent results. She has composed an operetta, "His Last Chance," besides vocal, choral, and violin pieces. Harriet Maitland Young has ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... statesman. Before long The Traveller and The Deserted Village gave Goldsmith a foremost place among the poets of the time, and The Vicar of Wakefield, published in 1776, brought him fame as a novelist. This book remains to-day, after the lapse of nearly a century and a half, one of the most widely read of English novels. Two comedies, The Good-natured Man and She Stoops to Conquer, complete the list of his well-known works, while he wrote many others that were enjoyed ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... of my Western sea, the circle almost circled. from "Leaves of Grass," by Walt Whitman the American poet; "Truth, witness of the past, councillor of the present, guide of the future," from "Don Quixote," by Cervantes, the Spanish novelist. ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... adventurous life, and showed not the smallest signs of repentance. Yes, I like Penrod, though I have not any great desire to meet him in the flesh. It grieves me, however, that such a character as Mr. Kinosling should have been dragged in by the heels. If fatuous clerics are worth any novelist's attention they certainly are not worth Mr. TARKINGTON'S, and the only effect Mr. Kinosling had upon me was to fortify my conviction that it is far easier to begin a book of humour ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... optimist. As a fiction-fed girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant people who made their own elastic code of morals and played ducks and drakes with the Commandments. She had accepted as a fact the novelist-playwright contention that society was synonymous with flippancy, selfishness and unchastity, and that the possession of money and leisure necessarily undermined all that was excellent in human nature. Perhaps a little to her ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... 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 ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... estimate the taste of the future by that of the present, the reading public will not often look behind the most recent publications of its own day. But les delicats will look back on Stevenson as they now look back on Fielding, who, to my simple thinking, remains unsurpassed as a novelist; and as they turn to Lamb and Hazlitt as essayists. The poet is, of course, at his best immortal—time cannot stale Beowulf, or the nameless lyrists of the fourteenth century, or Chaucer, or Spenser, and so with the rest, la mort n'y mord. But it is as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the similarity between it and an episode in the life of his great-grandfather. This venerable ancestor, when fine society was less tenacious of its associations, entered upon the cultivation of pumpkins as a business, but in after life, as the novelist has it, became a railroad president, and as an inseparable result, a great financier. When in the latter position, being a very sensitive person, he tried to get rid of the odor of the pumpkin business; ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... (Grant Richards) is a story that unblushingly bases its appeal on the love of almost everyone for a fairy-tale of good fortune. The matter of it is to show how a lady amateur, wife of a novelist, herself hardly knowing one end of a horse from the other, might make forty thousand pounds in a year on the Turf, without even her own husband so much as suspecting her activities. The thing isn't likely, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... in psychological character analysis; Poe the story-teller would be missing, and the art of the modern short story, which in English sterns from him; Cooper would be lost from our accounting, for all his crudities the best historical novelist after Scott; Mark Twain, Howells, Bret Harte, Irving! The attempt to exalt American literature is grateful ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... plan of composition. He knew well that it obliged a writer to add largely from invention to what was actually known—to fill in with the colouring of romantic fancy the bare outline of historic fact—and thus to place the novelist's fiction in what he could not but consider most unfavourable contrast to the historian's truth. He was further by no means convinced that any story in which historical characters supplied the main ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... make it pretty certain that Halifax was intended. But it by no means follows that because a certain person is "talked of" for a lady, and a lover put in fear by the rumour, the person is really a rival: and not even a biographer would have shown himself so unfit for a novelist as to have drawn such a conclusion, unless he had been biassed by the wish to show that Halifax was attached ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... No novelist would dare to picture such an array of beautiful climatic conditions,—the rosy dawn, the morning star, the moon on the horizon, the sea stretching in level beauty to the sky-line,—and on this sea to place an ice-field like the Arctic regions and icebergs ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... to pity the mocking author who was debarred by his own language from possessing the whole of his own comedy. It is, in fact, by contrast with his English that an Englishman does possess it. Your official, your professional Parisian has a vocabulary of enormous, unrivalled mediocrity. When the novelist perceives this he does not perceive it all, because some of the words are the only words in use. Take an author at his serious moments, when he is not at all occupied with the comedy of phrases, and he now and ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... errors of at least a number of socialists are due, not to any defect in their reasoning powers, as such, but to a want of balanced knowledge of human nature in general, a want which in certain respects renders their reasoning futile. The work to which I refer is a work by a socialistic novelist, who was also an accomplished naturalist—the late Mr. Grant Allen. It is called The ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... moreover, to the men of imagination, not to those who write books or poems, but to those who tunnel mountains, build vast bridges, invent new motors, and play with electrical currents as if they were ribbons. The novelist basing himself on what he knows of human nature projects himself into the unknown, just as the scientist who stands on the discoveries of those before him feels out into the darkness for new stars, new forces. And yet as Clarke ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Bibliothek der schnen Wissenschaften[5] entitled "Ueber die Laune." Lichtenberg in his brief essay, "Ueber den deutschen Roman,"[6] is undoubtedly more than half serious in his arraignment of the German novel and his acknowledgment of the English novelist's advantage: the trend of this satirical skit coincides with the opinion above outlined, the points he makes being characteristic of his own humorous bent. That the English sleep in separate apartments, with big chimneys in their bedchambers, that they have comfortable ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... human hand. It practices a chill anonymity as if it contains a warrant for a hanging. At first you hope it may be merely an announcement from your tailor, inasmuch as commerce patterns its advertisements on these social forms. I am told that there was once a famous man—a distinguished novelist—who so disliked formal parties but was so timid at their rejection that he took refuge in the cellar whenever one of these forbidding documents arrived, until he could forge a plausible excuse; for he believed that these colder and ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... the monotonous variety produced by his vagabond nature, and such psychical interest as might possibly attach to stories of his mediumistic temperament, it would be rather hum-drum. Brendan, however, has had the ill luck to be selected by some unknown antient Irish novelist as the hero of a romance of the wildest kind, which has certainly spread his name, if not his fame, in quarters which in all his travels he could never have anticipated. Even in the Canary Islands, the natives apply the term 'Isla de San Borondon' to a peculiar effect like mirage, showing ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... most honourably remembered for his learning and brilliancy, and the power and point of his sarcasm, which long made the 'Dublin Evening Mail' one of the most formidable of Irish press critics; but let us now pass to the consideration of him in the capacity of a novelist, and in particular as the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... a fool 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 ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... fellow-men and women are the actors; and that not even heightened by the conventional colouring which Madame de Stael philosophically declares that fiction always wants in order to make up for its not being truth. Indeed, so far from taking any advantage of this novelist's licence, Mr. Thackeray has hardly availed himself of the natural average of remarkable events that really do occur in this life. The battle of Waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but, as far ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... was written at least four times; and when the book was finished, more than half of it was destroyed so that a fresh suggestion might be worked in. This wonderful capacity for taking infinite pains has remained one of the chief characteristics of this novelist. In 1886 Mr. Caine brought out 'A Son of Hagar,' and this was followed by 'The Deemster' (1887), afterwards dramatized under the title of 'Ben-Ma'-Chree'; 'The Bondman' (1890); 'The Scapegoat' (1891); 'The Last Confession,' 'Cap'n Davy's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... success as a reporter and a correspondent, and after I have achieved something in that line I may look to an editorial position; and who knows but my fertile imagination, coupled with the experiences sure to come to me, may develop the great American novelist the ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... townships of Quebec, to the regions of Kingston and Niagara and Toronto in Ontario came some twenty thousand more. It needs no {313} trick of fancy to call up the scene, and one marvels that neither poet nor novelist has yet made use of it. Here were fine old Royalist officers of New York reduced from opulence to penury, from wealth to such absolute destitution they had neither clothing nor food, nor money to pay ship's passage away, now ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... said reflectively. "It sounds like a nom de plume; it suggests the kind of name a lady novelist would assume. Too singular to be real. And are you quite sure that the lady wrote ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... dissent from the broad principles here adverted to; who deny that it is the novelist's vocation to do more than merely amuse them; who shrink from all honest and serious reference, in books, to subjects which they think of in private and talk of in public everywhere; who see covert implications where nothing is implied, and improper allusions where nothing improper ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... circumspection not to be surpassed. When alone with him and Estelle, she was one person; when in company, she was another, not a little like Mrs. Foss, retaining enough of her own irrepressible self to seem just acceptably original. Antonia, the novelist, declared a fondness for people out of the ordinary, the conventional. Gerald thought the American might interest her. But if she did not, little depends, at a reception, upon the hostess being charmed with individual guests; he still believed that ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... novelist-hero is on dangerous ground. If he be a little less than perfectly sincere he runs risk of being pretentious, fatuous even. But sincerity is just Mr. CHARLES MARRIOTT'S conspicuous quality, and here in The Unpetitioned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... himself which is now at Trafalgar Square, and which Rouquet must often have seen in its home at Leicester Fields. Highmore too had certainly at this date painted more than one successful portrait of Samuel Richardson, the novelist; and even Hayman had made essay in this direction with the picture of Lord Orford, now in the National Portrait Gallery. A good many of the painters of the last reign must also, during Rouquet's residence in England, have been alive and active, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson worked himself so far free of this his besetting tendency to moralised symbolism or allegory into the freer air of life and real character, would do more to throw light on Stevenson's genius, and the obstacles he had had to contend with in becoming a novelist eager to interpret definite times and character, than has yet been done or even faithfully attempted. This would show at once Stevenson's wonderful growth and the saving grace and elasticity of his temperament and genius. Few men who have by force ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... nature, not in the stiff formal language in which it had become conventional with divines to set out its shortcomings and dangers, but as a great novelist contemplates and tries to describe it; taking in all its real contradictions and anomalies, its subtle and delicate shades; fixing upon the things which strike us in ourselves or our neighbours as ways of acting and marks of character; following it through its wide and varying range, its ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... visit, but somehow or other the card with the boarding-house street and number had been lost or mislaid, and the long list of "James Pearsons" in the directory discouraged him. He speculated much concerning the mystery at which the would-be novelist hinted as preventing his accepting Caroline's invitation. Evidently Pearson had once known Rodgers Warren well, and had been esteemed and respected by the latter. Caroline, too, had known him, and was frankly pleased ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... group is the large one, and its names are those of the later group as well. Let them be alphabetical, for convenience: William Cullen Bryant, poet and critic; George William Curtis, essayist and editor; Emerson, our noblest name in the sphere of pure essay literature; Hawthorne, the novelist of conscience, as Socrates was its philosopher; Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose "two chief hatreds were orthodoxy in religion and heterodoxy in medicine"; James Russell Lowell, essayist and poet, apt to live by his essays rather than by his poetry; Longfellow, whose "Psalm of Life" ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... funeral is history; another tale of the Chertsey curfew bell is legend. It was first put into the form of a story and dramatised by a now almost forgotten novelist-poet, Albert Smith, who was born at Chertsey himself, and wrote books which were illustrated by Leech. He called his story Blanche Heriot: a Legend of the Chertsey Church, and the play in its outline follows the legend. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... 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. With our curiously inverted conceptions of reality ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... she told me that as the novelist's life was so delightful and during the good years at least such a comfortable support (she had these staggering optimisms) she meant to train up her boy to follow it. She took the ingenious view that it was a profession ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... generation. There's no doubt that he limited his public—wilfully. He alienated the many. And, say what you like, the judgment of posterity is not the judgment of the few." There was a faint murmur of dissent (from Furnival), but Wrackham's voice, which had gathered volume, rolled over it. "Not for the novelist. Not for the painter of ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair |
