University of Virginia Library

STORIES WHICH FIRST WERE LIVED

Jane Austen is another example of comparatively rapid creation, writing three of her best-known novels, "Pride and Prejudice" "Sense and Sensibility," and "Northanger Abbey" between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three. Yet "Pride and Prejudice," which practically survives the others, took her ten months to complete, and all her writings, it has again to be said, had first been deeply and intimately "lived."

Charlotte Bronte was a year in writing "Jane Eyre," spurred on to new effort by the recent rejection of "The Professor," but to write such a book in a year cannot be called overhasty production when one considers how much of "Jane Eyre" was drawn from Charlotte Bronte's own life, and also how she and her sisters had been experimenting with literature from their earliest childhood.

Thackeray considered an allowance of two years sufficient for the writing of a good novel, but that seems little enough when one takes into account the length of his best-known books, not to mention the perfection of their craftsmanship. Dickens, for all the prodigious bulk of his output, was rather a steady than a rapid writer. He considered, says Forster, "three of his not very large manuscript pages a good, and four an excellent, day's work."

"David Copperfield" was about a year and nine months in the writing, having been begun in the opening of 1849 and completed in October, 1850. "Bleak House" took a little longer, having been begun in November, 1851, and completed in August, 1853. "Hard Times" was a hasty piece of work, written between the winter of 1853 and the summer of 1854, and it cannot be considered one of Dickens's notable successes.

George Meredith wrote four of his greatest novels in seven years, "Richard Feverel," "Evan Harrington," "Sandra Belloni," and "Rhoda Fleming" being produced between 1859 and 1866. His poem, "Modern Love," was also written during that period.

George Eliot was a much-meditating painstaking writer, though "Adam Bede" cost her little more than a year's work. Her novels, however, as a rule, did not come forth without prayer and fasting, and, in the course of their creation, she used often to suffer from "hopelessness and melancholy." "Romola," to which she devoted long and studious preparation, she was often on the point of giving up, and in regard to it she gives expression to a literary ideal to which the gentleman with the contract for four novels a year, referred to in the outset of this paper, is probably a stranger.

"It may turn out," she says, "that I can't work freely and fully enough in the medium I have chosen, and in that case I must give, it up; for I will never write anything to which my whole heart, mind, and conscience don't consent; so that I may feel it was something—however small—which wanted to be done in this world, and that I am just the organ for that small bit of work."

Charles Kingsley who, if not a great novelist, has to his credit in "Westward Ho" one romance at least which, in the old phrase, "the world will not willingly

let die," was as conscientious in his work as he was brilliant.

Says a friend who was with him while he was writing "Hypatia": "He took extraordinary pains to be accurate. We spent one whole day in searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was there, and which was found there at last."

The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English language, "The Cloister and the Hearth," was what one might call a glutton for thoroughness. Of himself Charles Reade has said: "I studied the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed to write a line. I was a ripe critic before I became an artist." His commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled one of the rooms in his house. In his will he left these open to the inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which he had found so serviceable.

To name one or two more English novelists: Thomas Hardy's novels would seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things. His greatest work, "The Return of the Native," was on the stocks for four years, though a year seems to have sufficed for "Far from the Madding Crowd."