"The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton

This was another read from a century ago, being a reflective little handbook that Edith Wharton published in 1925 giving a very personal view of how to write novels and short stories effectively.

It is not very long, but it covers a great deal of ground and can I think helpfully be seen as an alternative set of thoughts to the gospel according to Virginia Woolf that was widely being propagated at this time and would have by far the longer-lasting influence during the past century.

A plethora of arguments are made in respect of how short stories differ from novels, how long novels should be, what a well-crafted novel looks like, and how they can mostly be categorised as novels of either character, manners or situation. Edith Wharton illustrates all her points with reference to her own favourite novelists - mostly from the nineteenth century - and throughout insists that good novels have to be constructed thoughtfully like good buildings.

She has no time for experimental approaches, such as the use of unreliable or indeed omniscient narrators, arguing that 'the reader should never be told more than the characters know, unless there is a definite artistic reason for it.' This is perhaps too purist a view, but I have more sympathy with her preference for approaches which show what characters are thinking and their motives via their actions (ie: putting them in revealing situations) rather than just telling us what is going on inside their heads.

The book ends with a discussion of the then recent publication / translation of the works of Marcel Proust which Edith Wharton finds to be terrifically exciting and to represent innovation of a kind she approves of. At least on that point she very much agrees with Virginia Woolf.