"Novelist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... modern furniture and appliances, is to take the place of the old rooms, coffee-room, billiard-room, and bar. In fact, it is to become a modern hotel. The change is quite enough to make the shade of Dickens arise. As John Forster has told us, the great novelist loved this old chop-house, and, after a ramble on the Heath, often adjourned here for a ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... threatening of gout, and must have recourse to rest and remedial measures. He sent us out to buy the works of 'Fernan Caballero;' but only one volume was to be had, and no explanation was given us of the strange fact that the writings of the most popular novelist in Spain are not to be obtained in the capital of Andalusia, where she lives, and whence all her characters and scenery are taken. No satisfactory map or guide-book of Seville could be found. I took a catalogue of the books that the shop contained back to Henry. They were ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... "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 at the last ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... 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 and his party indignantly declared, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... 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
... the Will, by JAMES PAYN, says the Baron. Successful novelist is our "J.P." for England and the Colonies generally. "The profits blazoned on the Payn," is a line he quotes, with a slight difference of spelling, in his present three volumes, which is full of good things; his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... work of its wonderful author."—New York World. "We touch regions and attain altitudes which it is not given to the ordinary novelist even to approach."—London Times. "In no other story has Mrs. Ward approached the brilliancy and vivacity of ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... 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. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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 opinions ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... economy and self-control have barely managed to keep out of debt; I, who have never given way to youthful follies or run into excess, now see a million thrown at my head. This is contrary to the ideas of the romancing novelist, who as a rule reforms and rewards the wildest youth. I almost knocked over the lamp on opening the letter which contained this incredible news; fortunately my landlady caught it, for she was waiting ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... 1898 to be precise, that Hardy abandoned prose and challenged attention as a poet. The Dynasts, a drama of the Napoleonic Wars, is in three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes, a massive and most amazing contribution to contemporary art. It is the apotheosis of Hardy the novelist. Lascelles Abercrombie calls this work, which is partly a historical play, partly a visionary drama, "the biggest and most consistent exhibition of fatalism in literature." While its powerful simplicity and tragic impressiveness overshadow his shorter poems, many of his terse lyrics reveal ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... 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
... these Northern authors. Nothing appears forced; nothing indicates that the writer ever thought of style, yet the style is such as could not well be improved upon. He is evidently thoroughly imbued with the loftiest ideas, and the men and women whom he draws with the novelist's facility and art are as admirable as his manner of interweaving their lives with their country's battles and ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... part 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 by ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... its ways, manners, and customs,—knows more of these things and a thousand others from Dickens's novels than from all the histories, geographies, biographies, and essays in the language. Where is there another novelist who has so peopled a great city with his imaginary characters that there is hardly room for the living population, as one walks along ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... more wonderful transformation Giles could scarcely have imagined. Shortly he was ordered to smoke. The Princess lighted a cigarette herself, and began abruptly to tell her tale. It was quite worthy of a melodramatic novelist. ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... was 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... for I must infer from his graphic accounts, especially of interior progress—while already three more years have since elapsed—that even my most sanguine anticipations will be exceeded. Our great Scottish poet and novelist has ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... Lys dans la Vallee" 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 strong impression of the force of human endeavour. Balzac, in the maturity ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... I asked. Then I spoke in Africa's defense, setting out her case as well as I could. 'She's emphatically a feminine continent,' I said. 'I learned only the other day from a modern novelist that a woman's possibly at the height of her power with a man, just when her contact with him is but one of hope and memory. Surely that is true enough of some women and some men. Isn't Africa one of such women, and Dick one of such men? She knows her own business, and sends him ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Never did poet or novelist imagine scenes so improbable. The son of an obscure lawyer in an unimportant island becomes Emperor of the French and King of Italy. His brothers and sisters become kings and queens. The sons of innkeepers, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... The novelist loves to treat of tragic situations, often giving them a fatal ending to excite the feelings of his readers. We must avoid basing sexual ethics on such ideas. The average man, or even one whose nature is a little above the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... whole mode of life. Travel is an excellent thing, yet practically it proves inadequate. The fleeting impressions do not remain, and only what remains steadily and permanently in the mind can be used as a model by the novelist. ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... than what they liked; Barbara was accordingly set next to an art editor, who tried to wheedle from her an article on "Eastern Decoration in Western Houses," while Eric found himself sandwiched without hope of escape between Mrs. Manisty, who discussed poetry which he had not read, and the flamboyant novelist, who had lately discovered and insisted on exposing a mutual-admiration ring in the novel-reviewers of the ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... he was certain that help and comfort from without were in the nature of things utterly impossible, his ruin and grief were within, and only his own assistance could avail. He tried to reassure himself, to believe that his torments were a proof of his vocation, that the facility of the novelist who stood six years deep in contracts to produce romances was a thing wholly undesirable, but all the while he longed for but a drop of that inexhaustible fluency which ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... remote and eastern that the merchants brought their curious goods upon the backs of camels or on strange craft riding at anchor on the broad Volga. But even here our letter of introduction to Korolenko, the novelist, brought us to a realization of that strange mingling of a remote past and a self-conscious present which Russia presents on every hand. This same contrast was also shown by the pilgrims trudging on pious errands to monasteries, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... ensued. On the morning of the 18th he became speechless, and at midnight he expired. His sister, Madame de Surville, visited his deathbed, and the pressure of her hand was the last sign he gave of intelligence." We must defer for another occasion what we have to say of the great novelist-the idol of women, even at seventy-the Voltaire of our age, as he was accustomed to style himself in private—the historian of society—French society—as it is. The author of Le Peau de Chagrin, Le ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... lady of temperament is a difficult thing to picture. The bird may feel it as he soars, on a bright August morning, high above amber cliffs jutting out into indigo seas; the novelist may feel it when the four walls of his room magically disappear and the profound secrets of the universe are on the point of revealing themselves. Honora gazed, and listened, and lost herself. She was no longer in Uhrig's Cave, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... all 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
... bookish atmosphere of the novelist's study penetrated the muffled chime of Big Ben; it chimed the three-quarters. But, with his mind centered upon his work, Leroux ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... than Mr. Jedediah Cleishbotham had "opined," and hence comes a languor which does not beset the story of "Old Mortality." Scott's own love of adventure and of stirring incidents at any cost is an excellent quality in a novelist, but it does, in this instance, cause him somewhat to dilute those immortal studies of Scotch character which are the strength of his genius. The reader feels a lack of reality in the conclusion, the fatal encounter of the father and the lost son, an ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Aikman" (Harold H. Armstrong)—novelist. Born in 1879. His books dealing with the psychology of the ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... one of Charles Reade's heroes who was wavering between the attractions of two women, and the novelist represents the simpler of the two as being careful that there should always be a blazing hearth when the lover came. This innocent device gave him a sense of comfort which almost won his heart. It seemed to ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... defeat, of watching from the towers of high achievement or lying prone in the valley of failure, not one of that little circle ever lost the golden memory of those magic evenings in the home of the novelist and poet, the thinker and dreamer, William Gilmore Simms, the intellectual ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... disappeared, Shorely noticed how long his ulster was, and how it flapped about his heels. The next time he saw the novelist was under circumstances that could never be ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... people." In England her position would be secure and she could summon whom she would to dine with her; but in New York we have to be careful lest, by asking to our houses some distinguished actor or novelist, people might think we did not know we should select our friends—not for what they are, ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... that many a distinguished man of letters will show in the presence of a noble lord. No amount of philosophy enables one to rise entirely superior to the trammels of early training and hoary association. Even when the great novelist feels himself as at least on a level with his ducal interlocutor, he cannot ignore the fact that his fellow-guests do not share his opinion. Now, without going the length of asserting that there is absolutely nothing of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... through Pre-Raphaelitism into what was called AEstheticism, the remains of the inspiration of Carlyle fill a very large part in the Victorian life, but not strictly so large a part in the Victorian literature. Charles Kingsley was a great publicist; a popular preacher; a popular novelist; and (in two cases at least) a very good novelist. His Water Babies is really a breezy and roaring freak; like a holiday at the seaside—a holiday where one talks natural history without taking it seriously. Some of the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... however offensive, could procure him a single foe. In 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. It could scarcely ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... 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 ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Addison's fine polish but with more sympathy for human life; he is a dramatist, one of the very few who have ever written a comedy that can keep its popularity unchanged while a century rolls over its head; but greater, perhaps, than the poet and essayist and dramatist is Goldsmith the novelist, who set himself to the important work of purifying the early novel of its brutal and indecent tendencies, and who has given us, in The Vicar of Wakefield, one of the most enduring characters in English fiction. In his manner, especially in his poetry, Goldsmith ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... over-confidence of a vain man, when, from time to time, he heard allusions to the devotion of Thayer Kent to Ethel. Kent had been in the field before Rangely presented himself as a rival candidate for the damsel's good graces; and the novelist might have been less confident had not personal interest blinded him to a state of things which he would have apprehended easily enough where another was concerned. The easy familiarity, born of long friendship and perfect understanding, which Ethel showed toward Kent, Fred ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... twenty-sixth, we find the following entry in his Journal: "Scenery charming. I saw nothing in Massachusetts equal to the Valley of the Mohawk, and am surprised that novelist and poet have not found more material ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... 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 works. ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Francesca 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, making ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... and has suffered at the hands of a woman. The tragic story of "Owd Mattha o' Marlby Moor" is recorded by the sexton whose duty it is to toll the passing bell, and Mr. Fletcher, whose reputation as a novelist is deservedly high, has rendered the narrative with consummate art. The use of dialect enhances the directness and dramatic realism of the story at every turn; the characters stand out sharp and clear, and we are brought face to face with the passion that ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... pseudonym adopted from the name of a village in the province of Ciudad Real by the Spanish novelist Cecilia Francisca Josefa Boehl de Faber y Larrea. Born at Morges in Switzerland on the 24th of December 1796, she was the daughter of Johan Nikolas Boehl von Faber, a Hamburg merchant, who lived long in Spain, married a native of Cadiz, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 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 ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a little surprised during my first days in Paris to see the popularity of Cooper as a novelist. His stories are for sale at every book-stall, and are in all the libraries. They are sold with illustrations at a cheap rate, and I think I may say with safety that he is as widely read in France as any foreign ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... or less educated. Mr. Meldon had proclaimed himself a bachelor of arts. It was natural to suppose that he would have known the name, even the real name, of a famous living novelist. Apparently he did not. Miss King felt a ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... the KING fled—the MAN was alone. Had I the pen of a G. P. R. James, I would describe Valoroso's torments in the choicest language; in which I would also depict his flashing eye, his distended nostril—his dressing-gown, pocket-handkerchief, and boots. But I need not say I have NOT the pen of that novelist; suffice it ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Juvenal, so far as instruction is concerned; because the miscellaneous satires of the former are directed against every vice—the more confined ones of the latter (for the most part) only against one. All mankind is the field the novelist should cultivate—all truth, the moral he should strive to bring home. It is in occasional dialogue, in desultory maxims, in deductions from events, in analysis of character, that he should benefit and instruct. It is not enough—and I wish a certain novelist who has lately arisen would remember ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... A small dark stealthy butler and a convulsive boy with hair (apparently) taking the place of eyes waited. On this occasion Lady Beach-Mandarin had gathered together two cousins, maiden ladies from Perth, wearing valiant hats, Toomer the wit and censor, and Miss Sharsper the novelist (whom Toomer detested), a gentleman named Roper whom she had invited under a misapprehension that he was the Arctic Roper, and Mr. Brumley. She had tried Mr. Roper with questions about penguins, seals, cold and darkness, icebergs and glaciers, Captain Scott, Doctor Cook and the shape of the earth, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... lettres and in society. Sovereigns, unless it be Frederic the Great or Napoleon, Mary of Scotland or Marie Antoinette, generals, politicians, professional men, do not go for much. The competition is for the poet, the novelist, the newsmonger, or some enfant terrible, whose autograph is rare to excess. To be on thoroughly good posthumous terms with collectors, one has no need to have been respectable, sober, benevolent, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... that she could get all of the dim light that slanted through the tiny shuttered window, Mary began, her voice raised to meet the need of Mrs. De Peyster's aural handicap. Now Marie Corelli may have been the favorite novelist of a certain amiable queen, who somehow managed to continue to the age of eighty-two despite her preference. But Mrs. De Peyster liked no fiction; and the noble platitudes, the resounding moralizings, the prodigious melodrama, the vast caverns of words ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... power you have, Norman! You would make your fortune as a novelist. What can I have to be unhappy about? Should you think that any woman has a lot more brilliant than mine? See how young I am for my position—how entirely I have my own way! Could any one, do you think, be more ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... "A novelist?" cried Ruth, thrilling. And yet the secondary emotion was one of suspicion. That a longing of hers should be realized in this strange fashion was difficult to believe: it vaguely suggested ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... women laid their heads together in his absence, and Sophie's plan grew apace, for Ruth longed to see a real novelist and a fine lady, and Aunt Plumy, having plans of her own to further, said "Yes, dear," ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... golfer. There seemed 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 ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... 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 neophytes, I refrain from informing your readers how ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... novel, romance, Minerva press; fairy tale, nursery tale; fable, parable, apologue[obs3]; dime novel, penny dreadful, shilling shocker relator &c. v.; raconteur, historian &c. (recorder) 553; biographer, fabulist[obs3], novelist. V. describe; set forth &c. (state) 535; draw a picture, picture; portray &c. (represent) 554; characterize, particularize; narrate, relate, recite, recount, sum up, run over, recapitulate, rehearse, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and join in the chorus of God save the King, and Britannia rules the Waves—then the favourite songs of Englishmen. The war being at an end, amongst those who left the public service with a pension was the father of our novelist. Coming to London, he subsequently found lucrative employment for his talents on the press as a reporter of parliamentary debates. Charles Dickens may, therefore, be said to have been in his youth familiarised with "copy;" and when his father, with parental ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... the English crown, in order that the reader, understanding the localities, may enter with deeper interest into the incidents of a tale connected with a ground hitherto untouched by the wand of the modern novelist. ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... pleasures in their own likeness—and let them swamp their troughs! they shall not degrade the fame of noble fiction. We are the choice public, which will have good writing for light reading. Poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist, shall be ranked honourable in my Republic. I am neither, but a man of law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on the road to government and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as much from light literature as from heavy-as much, that is, from the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... red man, 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? He answered when spoken ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... RUSSELL: Ladies and gentlemen,—We have spent, I am sure you will all think, a most enjoyable, as well as a most instructive evening, thanks to the vivid picture of the great novelist of our generation put before us by my friend Mr. Lockwood, who has pointed out with force and effect the serious obligation we are under for many reforms which exist in our day through the influence, sometimes serious, ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... graduated, which he did with honors, he found himself his own master. His assets were a small income, a perfect knowledge of the French language, and the reputation of being one of the most expert swordsman in Paris. He chose not to enter the army, and instead became a journalist, novelist, duellist, an habitue of the Latin Quarter and ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... ability, one might have supposed, would nourish itself by devouring every old stone of such a structure,) once assured me that he had never in his life set eyes upon the Tower, though for years an historic novelist in London. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Sundays and holidays. Gustave Flaubert took him under his protection and acted as a kind of literary guardian to him, guiding his debut in journalism and literature. At Flaubert's home he befriended the Russian novelist Tourgueneff and Emilie Zola, as well as many of the protagonists of the realistic school. He wrote considerable verse and short plays. In 1878 he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and became a contributing editor to several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, le Gil Blas, ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... Brown, about to have this "great adventure." That is what Mother and I call this undertaking: "Our great adventure." Mother says it sounds Henry Jamesy and I take her word for it (so far I have not read that novelist), but he must be very interesting, as Mother and Professor Green used to discuss him for hours at ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... walking arm in arm. This dress does not debar them from discussing elevated subjects; but it would never occur to them in such a dress to smoke a cigar, to talk about trifles, or to satisfy the most legitimate requirements of the body. Flaubert, the novelist, could never understand that, as Sainte-Beuve relates, the recluses of Port Royal lived for years in the same house and addressed each other as Monsieur to the day of their death. The fact of the matter is that Flaubert had no sort of idea as to ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... buttons; the old, stiff, stout, bald-headed CONVERSAZIONE ROUES, whom You meet everywhere—who never miss a night of this delicious enjoyment; the three last-caught lions of the season—Higgs, the traveller, Biggs, the novelist, and Toffey, who has come out so on the sugar question; Captain Flash, who is invited on account of his pretty wife and Lord Ogleby, ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mrs. Cutler, the pretty Virginia novelist and society star, is now in Westchester County, and promises us a visit very soon. She speaks with deep feeling of the pleasure it will afford her to visit dear uncle's loved home, and in conclusion sends many kind messages to mamma's ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... "Notre Dame de Paris," the historical romance in which Hugo vied with Sir Walter. It was to have been followed by others, but the publisher unfortunately secured a contract to monopolize all the new novelist's prose fictions for a term of years, and the author revenged himself by publishing poems and plays alone. Hence "Notre Dame" long stood unique: it was translated in all languages, and plays and operas were founded on it. Heine professed to see in the prominence of the hunchback a personal ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... when he was writing for Mannheim's review. Then, they were enemies: Christophe was only just beginning, and the other was already famous. He had been a man of considerable power, very self-confident, very contemptuous of other men's work, a novelist whose realistic and sensual writings had stood out above the mediocrity of the productions of his day. Christophe, who detested the man, could not help admiring the perfection of his materialistic art, which was sincere, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... The gentleman novelist, however, prances in boldly, where feminine feet well may fear to tread, and consequently has a wider scope for his writing. It is not for a woman to mingle in a barroom brawl and write of the thing as she sees it. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... of grandfather and grandmotherhood, and all that "art d'etre grandpere" which have been written and sung until one turns a trifle sceptical about them. What I allude to has, on the contrary, escaped (almost entirely, I think) the desecrating pen of the analytical or moralizing novelist, and remains one of the half-veiled mysteries of human good fortune, before which the observer passes quickly in shy admiration. The case is this: one of the parents has been unwilling, or disappointed; marriage has meant emptiness, or ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... colonel, he greatly distinguished himself. He was born in Warwickshire, at the family seat, and died in London, in the seventy-third year, of his age.—21st. At Edgeworthstown, county of Longford, Ireland, in her eighty-fifth year, Miss Edgeworth, so celebrated as a novelist, and deserving equal celebrity as a metaphysician, for her novels abound with the most accurate and acute speculations in mental philosophy, incidentally occurring in the course of her narratives. She was small ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... claret. In the month of February, 1755, John Home's tragedy of "Douglas" was completely prepared for the stage, and he set out with it for London, attended by six or seven of us. Were I to relate all the circumstances of this journey, I am persuaded they would not be exceeded by any novelist who has wrote since the days of "Don Quixote." Poor Home had no success, for Garrick, after reading the play, returned it as totally unfit for the stage. "Douglas," however, was acted in Edinburgh in 1756, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... pertinacious facts, is too apt to transcend custom and the usage of novel-writers; and though the one brings a woman's legal existence to an end when she merges her independence in that of a man, and the other curtails her historic existence at the same point, because the novelist's catechism hath for its preface this creed,—"The chief end of woman is to get married"; still, neither law nor novelists altogether displace this same persistent fact, and a woman lives, in all capacities ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the world? Which is madder, the Spanish priest who permitted tyranny, or the Prussian sophist who admired it? Which is madder, the Russian priest who discourages righteous rebellion, or the Russian novelist who forbids it? That is the final and blasting test. The world left to itself grows wilder than any creed. A few days ago you and I were the maddest people in England. Now, by God! I believe we are the sanest. That is the only real question—whether the Church is really madder than the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... 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. Under his aspect of careless artist, his head ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... as a piece of naivety in this good soul of a novelist. To become a Catholic, I don't believe requires ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... write, that in this chapter at least I can count not only on attention, but on a general attitude of expectancy in the mind of the reader. And from one point of view he will be fairly satisfied, for the history of gold mining in Mysore has quite a romantic cast, and in the hands of a skilful novelist, there might be extracted from it much literary capital. The foremost fact indeed which I have to give has almost a sensational flavour, and at first sight seems a mere dream. We often read of fields of golden grain, but that ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... process that occurs during fasting can scarcely be believed by a person who has not fasted. No matter how gifted the writer, the experiential reality of fasting cannot be communicated. The great novelist Upton Sinclair wrote a book about fasting and it failed to convince the multitudes. But once a person has fasted long enough to be certain of what their own body can do to fix itself, they acquire a degree of independence little known today. ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... despised and reprobated novelist, by daring to unveil the crimes and miseries of neglected and ignorant men, and to point out the abuses which have produced, and are still producing, the same dreadful results, are missionaries in the cause of humanity, the real ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... pardon. This is not history, which has just been written. It is really what would have occurred if this were a novel. If this were a work of fiction, we should not dare to dispose of Laura otherwise. True art and any attention to dramatic proprieties required it. The novelist who would turn loose upon society an insane murderess could not escape condemnation. Besides, the safety of society, the decencies of criminal procedure, what we call our modern civilization, all would demand that Laura should be disposed of in the manner we ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 to meet him again. Whatever the trouble might be, ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of 'Christie Johnstone' is dead. I have read and re-read that charming little story with ever-increasing admiration. I am sorry for the coarseness of some of his later writings; but he was, after all, a great novelist, second only in our times to George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray.... I shall be glad to hear more about Mr. Wood's and Mrs. ——'s talks. Any hint or sign or token from the unseen and spiritual world is full of solemn interest, standing as I do on the shore of 'that vast ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... novelist, William Dean Howells, we have clung to the wisdom of Solomon, in this respect, through centuries of changing conditions. Solomon said: "Spare the rod and spoil the child"; Mr. Howells suggests that we might with profit spoil the rod and spare the child. In ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... gone, and then he returned to his gruesome den and proceeded to turn out artistic prodigies until the fit came upon him once more. Benvenuto Cellini was subject to similar paroxysms, during which he behaved like a maniac. Our own novelist Bulwer Lytton disappeared at times, and plunged into the wildest excesses among wretches whom he would have loathed when he was in his normal state of mind. He used to dress himself as a navvy, or as a sailor, and ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... and admired Grant; second, he is familiar in general with the conditions of life in the middle West, and is especially qualified to tell the truth both in color and fact. The tastes and training of a realistic novelist are an admirable equipment for a biographer, provided the hero of his story and his ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... politicians remember their existence. From time to time a philanthropist goes down there to share God's good gifts with his poorer brethren, or to elevate the masses with tinkling sounds or painted boards. From time to time an adventurous novelist is led round the opium-shops, dancing-saloons, and docks, returning with copy for tales of lust and murder that might just as well be laid in Siberia or Timbuctoo. When we scent an East End story on ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... or 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 ever new, and in alluring freshness go forth into the world ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... of their subject, seem to depart strangely from the spiritualism I here demand of all works of art? If this is permitted to the poet, the chaste nurseling of the muses, ought it not to be conceded to the novelist, who is only the half-brother of the poet, and who still touches by so many points? I can the less avoid this question because there are masterpieces, both in the elegiac and in the satirical kind, where the authors seek and preach up a nature quite different from that I am discussing ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the American short story as compared with the English short story, I am more impressed than ever with the leadership maintained by American artists in this literary form. Mr. James Stephens has been criticising us for our curiously negative achievement in novel writing. He has compared the American novelist with the English novelist and found him wanting. He is compelled to deny literary distinction to the American novel, and he makes a sweeping indictment of American fiction in consequence. But does he know ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... greater part of her fortune, are devoted to charitable objects. If I had invited you to stay with us you would have been simply bored to death. Amusement, social obligations, the duties we owe to society, do not belong to my mother's creed at all. If I might borrow a word from a renowned novelist, I would call her 'a charitable grinder,' for she grinds from morning till night at a never-ceasing wheel of committees, meetings, and Heaven ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... There is more plot, but the range is not so lofty. It is less philosophical in tone than "Elsie Venner," and the events move quicker. The scene of "The Guardian Angel" is also laid in an ordinary New England village, and the object of the Doctor-Novelist was to write a tale in which the peculiarities and laws of hysteria should find expression and development. In carrying out his plan, Dr. Holmes has achieved a genuine success. He has taught a lesson, and at the same time has told a deeply interesting ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... might, with 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
... about me in every newspaper, all the same day—mostly interviews—and quoted me as a classic. Some of 'em described me as a painter, and others as a novelist: I never was either; but it ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... amiable young man, who had been in bad company, but was quite repentant and reformed. He and Macartney afterwards murdered the Duke of Hamilton between them, in which act Lord Mohun died. This amiable baron's name was Charles, and not Henry, as a recent novelist has ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... man, who stood at this right hand, was speaking. His name was Walter Aynesworth, and he was a writer of short stories—a novelist in embryo. ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is a Virtue in which our Countrymen are observed to be more deficient than any other Nation. Melancholy is a kind of Demon that haunts our Island, and often conveys her self to us in an Easterly Wind. A celebrated French Novelist, in opposition to those who begin their Romances with the flow'ry Season of the Year, enters on his Story thus: In the gloomy Month of November, when the People of England hang and drown themselves, a disconsolate Lover walked ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... (3) Born at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, December 5, 1857. Educated at Robinson Seminary, Exeter. She is chiefly known as a novelist, having written with great art of the life of New England. Among her best-known volumes are "Meadow Grass", a collection of short stories; "Tiverton Tales"; "The Mannerings"; "Margaret Warrener"; "Rose MacLeod"; "My Love and I", etc. In 1915 Miss Brown received a prize ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... given a novelist a harder case than to prove the likeableness of Cherry Mart, as her actions show her in September (METHUEN), and I wonder how a Victorian writer would have dealt with the terrible chit. But FRANK SWINNERTON, of course, is able to hold these astonishing briefs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... two of these stories. One is called "The Story of a Book," the other "The Biography of a Superman." Each is rather an essay than a tale, though the form of each is narrative. The first relates the sad bewilderment of a successful novelist who feels that, after all, his great work was ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... been educated at grammar schools and gone into business in their teens. Of course, Mrs. Potter had pulled the social level up a bit; but what, if you came to that, had Mrs. Potter been? Only the daughter of a country doctor; only the underpaid secretary of a lady novelist, for all she ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... believes what he says, but it is impossible for any student of Irish history or of Irish politics to believe Mr. M'Carthy. Facts are too strong for him. Mr. Lalor showed a prevision denied to our amiable novelist. Gustave de Beaumont understood political philosophy better than the lively recorder of the superficial aspects of recent English history. Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt, and the whole line of witnesses before the Special Commission, tell a different tale. The very name of ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... find 'em in London and New York and San Francisco just the same. They're convinced they're the wisest people on earth. There's a few artists and a bum novelist or two always, and some social workers. The particular bunch that it amuses me to hate just now—and that I apparently can't do without—they gather around Olympia Johns, who makes a kind of salon out of her rooms on ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... 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. ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... contained; and even that Mr. Hare's engraver has disfigured into the nearly or the utterly irrecognizable. Two Pencil-sketches, which no artist could approve of, hasty sketches done in some social hour, one by his friend Spedding, one by Banim the Novelist, whom he slightly knew and had been kind to, tell a much truer story so far as they go: of these his Brother has engravings; but these also I must suppress ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... remember little more than that, but Clemens recalls that one speaker made an effort to follow him—Bishop, the novelist, and that Bishop ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... main room which gives on Fifth Avenue, he found Ten Eyck Jones talking war. Jones was a novelist, but he did not look like one. There was nothing commercial in his appearance, which was that of a man half-asleep, except when he talked and then he seemed very much awake. He was not fat and though an inkbeast, he dressed after the manner of those who put themselves ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... supposed he was about to act. He did not act, delaying in true native style, and I determined I should go to visit him. I have been very good not to go sooner; to live within a few miles of a rebel camp, to be a novelist, to have all my family forcing me to go, and to refrain all these months, counts for virtue. But hearing that several people had gone and the government done nothing to punish them, and having an ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (1831-1885) was an American poet and novelist. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor in Amherst College, but she spent much of her life in California. She married a banker in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she lived for a few years. Her poems are very beautiful, and "September" ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... shoulders and shaking him violently. "She is not here, and that is what constitutes my illness. Besides, I am not ill, I am dead. Take me to her, and I shall rise again. And you ask whether I will take her back again! You, a novelist, don't understand simple things ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... of this lady's inconsequences that Faustine was educated. Wherever she looked, the candors of her girlhood were violated. The phallus then was omnipresent. Iamblicus, not the novelist, but the philosopher, has much to say on the subject; as has Arnobius in the Adversus gentes, and Lactance in the De falsa religione. If Juvenal, Martial, Petronius, are more reticent, it is because they were not Fathers of the Church, nor yet antiquarians. No one among us exacts a description ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... for the fray, I did not see how I was to participate in it. I was not a novelist, not yet a dramatic author, and the possibility of a naturalistic poet seemed to me not a little doubtful. I had clearly understood that the lyrical quality was to be for ever banished; there were to be no harps and lutes in our heaven, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... known to us; 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
... novelist draws characters, and instead of a 'simple outline,' he unveils the human heart and gives you some interest either in Lubin or ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... Our Women (CASSELL) Mr. ARNOLD BENNETT coyly disclaims any intention of tackling his theme on strictly scientific principles. The warning is perhaps hardly necessary, since, apart from the duty which the author owes to his public as a novelist rather than a philosopher, the title alone should be a sufficient guide. One would hardly expect a serious zoologist, for instance, in attempting to deal with the domesticated fauna, to entitle his work Our Dumb Friends. The book is divided in the main between adjuration ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... may be DEAF; but the novelist has a loud, eloquent, instructive language, though his enemies may despise or deny it ever so much. What is more, one could, perhaps, meet the stoutest historian on his own ground, and argue with him; showing that sham histories were much truer than real histories; which ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... begin. You know you have got those rules to hang on to, and they are a great support in seasons of mental famine. Two themes and a subsidiary, and a lot of episodes for padding: that's all you need, and they are bound to come on in just a given order. Can you imagine a novelist sitting down and fitting his work neatly into a box measured off into compartments: one hero, one heroine, one extra, plus episodic sunsets and moonbeams galore? Not much! He makes his rules as he goes along. Sally, which is greater, to create a gown, ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... Yet he, who in the family 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
... ridden and lace worn and princesses rescued and won. He wants pictures of funny slums, and entertaining paupers, and laughable longshoremen, and kindly impulses making life sweet. He wants romance without its defiance, and humour without its sting; and the business of the novelist, he holds, is to supply this cooling refreshment. That is the Weary Giant theory of the novel. It ruled British criticism up to the period of the Boer war—and then something happened to quite a lot of us, and it ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... those tales of exciting adventure in the confection of which Mr. Boothby is not excelled by any novelist of ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... if he had at the time believed in the least that there was any possibility of a plot for political assassination being carried on in an English country-house. Soame Rivers reasoned, like a realistic novelist, from his own experiences only. He regarded the notion of such things taking place in an English country-house as no less an anachronism than the moving helmet in the 'Castle of Otranto' or the ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... victuals in that house." Concerning the scene between Sykes and Nancy, Charles Dickens the younger told me a curious story, at the time when I was writing for him on All the Year Round. They were living at Gad's Hill, and it was the novelist's practice to rehearse in a grove at the bottom of a big field behind the house. Nobody knew of this practice until one day the younger Charles heard sounds of violent threatening in a gruff, manly voice, and shrill calls ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... household events of the gravest importance in the future were destined to arise, and already it appears that Fanny Imlay had begun to look with perilous approval on the fascinating poet. Hogg and Mr. Peacock, the well-known novelist, described by Mrs. Newton as "a cold scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... account of the scholarship, the influence, the literary accomplishments, and the personal distinction of the man. Dr. Rizal was easily the foremost writer his race and country has produced. He was a poet, novelist, political essayist, and historian, and his execution was for the crime of loving his country, opposing the Spaniards, criticising and lampooning the priests. He is called the Tagalo Martyr, for he was of the tribe of Malay origin, the most numerous and rebellious in the Philippine ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... eloquent defense of her position. Mrs. Hooker's intellect is not her only charm. Her beautiful face and attractive manners all help to make converts. Mrs. Julia N. Holmes, the poet, one of the most admired ladies present, and Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, wore black velvet and diamonds. Mrs. Hodson Burnett, that "Lass o' Lowrie," in colored and rose silk with princess scarf, looked charmingly. Mrs. Senator Sargent, Mrs. Charles Nordhoff and her friends, the elegant Miss ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Heaven help the novelist whose fiction Miss Audley had been perusing, if he had no better critics than that young lady. She had read page after page without knowing what she had been reading, and had flung aside the volume half a dozen times to go to the window and watch for that visitor ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... the nineteenth century an ardent Lancastrian, ready to pluck a red rose with Somerset and die for Margaret and her prince; and Scott in like manner has made many a Jacobite, though in the latter case our novelist is too full of sense even in the midst of his own inclinations to become ever an out-and-out partisan. But, except these prepossessions, they have no parti pris. Every faction renders up its soul of meaning, the most diverse figures unclose themselves side by side. The wit, the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... that he possesses abundance of material, that he has secured the ear of the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life could be happier. Such a man seems to live on the finest of the wheat. If a poet, he is continually singing; if a novelist, he is supreme in his ideal world; if a humourist, everything smiles back upon his smile; if an essayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most memorable things. He breathes habitually the serener ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... novelist, and politician, and the most notable figure in contemporary Norwegian history—was born, in December 1832, at Kvikne in the north of Norway. His father was pastor at Kvikne, a remote village in the Oesterdal ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... needless here to tell,—or to attempt to tell,—how one Lord-Lieutenant had made way for another, and one Chief Secretary for another Chief Secretary. It would be trying to do too much. In the pages of a novel the novelist can hardly do more than indicate the sources of the troubles which have fallen upon the country, and can hardly venture to deal with the names and characters of those who have been concerned. For myself, I do most cordially ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... himself as breaking into "unknown and untrodden paths." It is not impossible that Sir Walter Scott's patronage of Jamieson had something to do with the ungenerous petulance of Borrow's references to the great novelist ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... and a lot of literary celebrities. At some of the names my chief would nod his approval, at others he would say curtly, with an affectation of American manners, "Bad; strike it off," until I came to the name I had kept for the last, that of Pierre Fauchery, the famous novelist. ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... be seen that they do not all 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, Sydney Carton's Text is really Charles ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... 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 with the object of entertainment have ever proved so universally entertaining. ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... speaker differs not at all from the poet, the novelist, the scientist, the traveler. He must add to his everyday stock, words of value for the public presentation of thought. "A study of the discourses of effective orators discloses the fact that they have a fondness for words signifying power, largeness, speed, action, color, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... unenviable notoriety from having been the scene, in days gone by, of some tragic occurrence, the memory of which has survived in the local legend, or tradition. The existence, too, of such rooms has supplied the novelist with the most valuable material for the construction of those plots in which the mysterious element holds a prominent place. Historical romance, again, with its tales of adventure, has invested numerous rooms with a grim aspect, and caused the imagination ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... anything, but to suggest ideas, to arouse emotions, is, I take it, the true function of fiction. One wishes to make one's readers THINK about problems they have never considered, FEEL with sentiments they have disliked or hated. The novelist as prophet has his duty defined for him in ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... performances. They hint of a genius which was denied full development. The character, however, from which they derive their vitality and their power to please, shines steadily through all the imperfections of plot and construction. The novelist, after all, only suggests the power and beauty of the man; and the man, though dead, will keep the novels alive. Through them we can commune with a rare and noble spirit, called away from earth before all its capacities of invention and action were developed, but still leaving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... of the southern temperament, the faults that accompany these traits, are plainly stated by the great novelist. Enthusiasm turns to hypocrisy, or brag; the love of what glitters, to a passion for luxury at any cost; sociability, the desire to please, become weakness and fulsome flattery. The orator beats his breast, his voice is hoarse, choked with emotion, his ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... adept at parliamentary management, a shrewd financier, and held a deep conviction that it was the part of statesmanship to embody in law what he conceived to be the proper demands of the nation. His opponent for a generation was Benjamin Disraeli, the young Jewish novelist, who had first won a following in the House of Commons by voicing the venom of the old-line protectionist Tories against the recreant Peel. Versatile, shifty, brilliant, this adventurous politician made himself indispensable ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... house, and after keeping him there as long as he desired to stay, he gave him a horse and sixteen ducats to help him home to England.[136] Foxe is the first English authority for the story; and Foxe took it from Bandello, the novelist; but it is confirmed by, or harmonizes with, a sketch of Cromwell's early life in a letter of Chappuys, the imperial ambassador, to Chancellor Granvelle. "Master Cromwell," wrote Chappuys in 1535, "is the son of a poor blacksmith, who lived in a small ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... heather, which stretch away with hardly a break twenty miles south and east to Aldershot Camp or Windsor Forest. On the brow of the hill grows a mighty bush of furze which always goes by the name of "Miss Bremer's furze-bush." When the dainty Swedish novelist once came to gladden Eversley Rectory with her presence she told how she longed to see the plant before which Linnaeus had fallen on his knees; and she walked up this selfsame hill and with eyes full of tears gazed on the prickly shrub with its mist of golden-colored, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... American novelist the other day, and he assured me that the Custom-house authorities on "the other side" seized all copies of Sir Richard Burton's "Nights" that came into their hands, and retained them as indecent publications. Burned them, I hope he ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... since the father of the first earl obtained it by marriage during the reign of Charles I. The Rothschild family have an estate at Tring; Lord Ebury is the owner of Moor Park; Lord Lytton still owns the grand old house of the great novelist at Knebworth, founded nearly 350 years ago. The Earl of Cavan has a house at Wheathampstead; Viscount Hampden at Kimpton Hoo; Earl Strathmore at St. Paul's Walden Bury; the Earl of Clarenden (Lord Lieut. of Herts) at the Grove, Leavesden; Lord Grimthorpe lived ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... of Downing Street-is not visible to the naked eye. To us Irish the blindness of England to the meaning of her own colonial work is a maddening miracle. A wit of the time met Goldsmith at dinner. The novelist was a little more disconcerting than usual, a result, let us charitably hope, of the excellence of the claret. Afterwards they asked his fellow-diner what he thought of the author. "Well," he replied, "I believe that that man wrote 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... soldier have a conscience? Do you take your idea of officers from the lady novelist, who makes us out to be ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... the conclusions about Greek landscape which I have got for him out of Homer; and in these he will certainly perceive something very different from the usual imaginations we form of Greek feelings. We think of the Greeks as poetical, ideal, imaginative, in the way that a modern poet or novelist is; supposing that their thoughts about their mythology and world were as visionary and artificial as ours are: but I think the passages I have quoted show that it was not so, although it may be difficult for us to apprehend the strange minglings ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the afternoon, and moved across level until night. In the morning we had a stretch of "scrub" country—the kind of thing which is so useful to the Australian novelist. In the scrub the hostile aboriginal lurks, and flits mysteriously about, slipping out from time to time to surprise and slaughter the settler; then slipping back again, and leaving no track that the white ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... quadrupeds, but that the great arts can be judged out of the depths of a penny-a-liner's inner consciousness, and to be rated and ranked need not be compared inter se. Applying the microscope to the method of the novelist, but diverting the glass from the learned judge's method in Biography, the learned historian's method in History, and the daily chronicler's method in dressing res gestoe for a journal, this little addle-pate has jumped ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... 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 crime of ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... 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, for the most part, colourless ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... "The Captain," but I am not the hero of this tale. No, by no means. I am altogether unheroic in my nature, commonplace in my character. If a novelist were to describe me, he would write me down a stout little old gentleman, with a bald head and a mild countenance; mentally weak in expression, active in habits, and addicted to ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... It was a Miss Pinker, and she was interested in me. Poor thing, her school failed afterwards. I don't know quite why, but she never could manage, and I don't think parents ever paid her. I had great ideas of myself then; I thought that I would be great, an actress or a novelist, but I got rid of all that soon enough. I was happy; we had friends, and luxuries were rare enough to make them valuable. Then—we came down here—this sea, this town, this ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... 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 a curious sort of coldness. ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of Malfi" was published in 1623, but the date of writing may have been as early as 1611. It is based on a story in Painter's "Palace of Pleasure," translated from the Italian novelist, Bandello; and it is entirely possible that it has a foundation in fact. In any case, it portrays with a terrible vividness one side of the court life of the Italian Renaissance; and its picture of the fierce quest of pleasure, the recklessness ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster |
