The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton — Read

The question of form-already defined as the order, in time and importance, in which the incidents of the narrative are grouped-is, for obvious reasons, harder to deal with in the novel than in the short story, and most difficult in the novel of manners, with its more crowded stage, and its continual interweaving of individual with social analysis.

The English novelists of the early nineteenth century were still farther enslaved by the purely artificial necessity of the double plot. Two parallel series of adventures, in which two separate groups of people were concerned, sometimes with hardly a link between the two, and always without any deep organic connection, were served up in alternating sections. Throughout the novels of Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope and the majority of their contemporaries, this tedious and senseless convention persists, checking the progress of each series of events and distracting the reader's attention. The artificial trick of keeping two stories going like a juggler's ball is entirely different from the attempt to follow the interwoven movements of typical social groups, as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair" and "The Newcomes," Balzac in "Le Père Goriot." In these cases the separate groups, either families or larger units, in a sense impersonate the protagonists of the tale, and their fates are as closely interwoven as those of the two or three persons on the narrow stage of a tale like "Silas Marner."