The English Novel: Makers and Masters

Abstract

In the preceding chapters we have considered some of the ways in which novelists shape their novels; in this chapter we shall consider some of these changes in the perspective of history. In the course of the last two centuries — let us say roughly from the time of Scott and Jane Austen to the present — the practice of the novelist has moved between two fictional poles: some novelists have been attracted by the possibility of creating in their novels an image of the world as they knew it; others have been aware that their novels drew primarily on materials which existed only in their imagination. Perhaps, in general, we might say that the predominant strain in novels written in English in the nineteenth century was ‘realistic’. The world of the novel, it was assumed, shared a border with the world in which everyday English men and women fell in love, married, and went about their trade and business. Contemporary readers of the fiction of Anthony Trollope (1815-82), or even of Jane Austen, might find little difference be-tween the events of their novels and the events of their own lives. The predominant strain in American fiction during the same period was more purely imaginative: it opened up regions of the spirit which were more unusual, more extreme, and more alarming than the middle ground of English fiction.