Explore "The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Most novels, for convenient survey, may be grouped under one or the other of three types: manners, character (or psychology) and adventure. These designations may be thought to describe the different methods sufficiently; but as a typical example of each, "Vanity Fair" for the first, "Madame Bovary" for the second, and, for the third, "Rob Roy" or "The Master of Ballantrae," might be named.
This grouping must be further stretched to include as subdivisions what might be called the farcical novel of manners, the romance and the philosophical romance; and immediately "Pickwick" for the first, "Harry Richmond," "La Chartreuse de Parme" or "Lorna Doone" for the second, and "Wilhelm Meister" or "Marius the Epicurean" for the third category, suggest themselves to the reader.