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Marciano Guerrero

Lives of the Novelists

Lives of the Novelists

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Sir Walter Scott was very much interested in writing techniques, in the construction of narratives, but in particular about the scaffolding of novels. So he wrote many essays to include a series which he collected and published as ‘The Novelist’s Library.’ Later, he agreed to give his printer a series of ‘prefaces’ which could be printed in a separate volume as “The Lives of the Novelists.’ In 1827, the Lives were included in Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Work.

The Lives is comprised of sketches or semblances of fourteen novelists, to include Samuel Johnson, who only wrote one novel. For many readers these semblances contain great historical rather than literary value. The prose is light, yet engaging; gossipy yet seriously informative. Scott himself said that the Lives have no “claim to merit of much research, being taken from the most accessible materials.”

This first volume includes the lives of Fielding, Smollett, Le Sage, Charles Johnstone, Sterne, Goldsmith, and Johnson.

In the second volume, now in process, we will include the other seven novelists: Mackenzie, Walpole, Reeve, Richardson, Bage, Cumberland, and Mrs. Radcliffe.
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