![]() Here again a French novelist-the Abbé Prévost-led the way with “Manon Lescaut” but his drawing of character seems summary and schematic when his people are compared with the first great figure in modern fiction-the appalling “Neveu de Rameau.” It was not till long after Diderot’s death that the author of so many brilliant tales peopled with eighteenth century puppets was found, in the creation of that one sordid, cynical and desolately human figure, to have anticipated not only Balzac but Dostoievsky.īut even from “Manon Lescaut” and the “Neveu de Rameau,” even from Lesage, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Scott, modern fiction is differentiated by the great dividing geniuses of Balzac and Stendhal. The next advance was made when the protagonists of this new inner drama were transformed from conventionalized puppets-the hero, the heroine, the villain, the heavy father and so on-into breathing and recognizable human beings. Modern fiction really began when the “action” of the novel was transferred from the street to the soul and this step was probably first taken when Madame de La Fayette, in the seventeenth century, wrote a little story called “La Princesse de Clèves,” a story of hopeless love and mute renunciation in which the stately tenor of the lives depicted is hardly ruffled by the exultations and agonies succeeding each other below the surface. The exploration of origins is always fascinating but the attempt to relate the modern novel to the tale of Joseph and his Brethren is of purely historic interest. To treat of the practice of fiction is to deal with the newest, most fluid and least formulated of the arts. Beyond a treatise on craft, The Writing of Fiction is a sweeping meditation by a masterful practitioner and a rare chance to experience the inimitable voice of one of America’s most influential novelists. Wharton provides invaluable insight on the subjects of character, the challenge of finely-tuned short stories, the construction of a novel, and more. The Writing of Fiction is a window into Wharton’s mind as she ponders the intertwined arts of writing and reading. To each new generation of readers, her work remains fresh, formally remarkable, and endlessly entertaining. Over the course of her career, she would continue to produce beloved, bestselling work-from The House of Mirth to The Custom of the Country-and gained a reputation for her incisive critiques of her upper-class social circle. In 1921, Edith Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize for her first novel, The Age of Innocence. ![]() A rare work of nonfiction from Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction contains timeless advice on writing and reading well from the first woman ever to win a Pulitzer Prize-now with a new introduction by Brandon Taylor. ![]()
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