The novel : what it is / [Hardcover]

F. Marion Crawford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1893

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 108 pages
• Publisher: Classic Books (January 1893)
• ISBN-10: 0742642518
• ISBN-13: 978-0742642515
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,616,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Pleasantly Antiquated Essay, April 30, 2011

By 

G. Charles Steiner - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The novel: What it is (Paperback)

I did not know that F. Marion Crawford was born in Italy and that after getting a good education in America, he returned to Italy and lived there till he died. Perhaps that fact of his being a "foreigner" of sorts accounts for his not "turning up" in lists of American novels of the 19th or 20th century. Yet, according to Wikipedia, Graham Greene and F. Scott Fitzgerald were aware of him and his novels, mentioning Crawford in at least one of their own respective novels.

This book was first published in 1893 when Francis Marion Crawford was 39 years of age. At 108 pages, the book is one extended essay with brief breaks here or there, no chapters at all. Wikipedia summarizes the essence of the essay-long book quite well:

"The novel, he wrote, is 'a marketable commodity' and 'intellectual artistic luxury' (8, 9) that 'must amuse, indeed, but should amuse reasonably, from an intellectual point of view. . . . Its intention is to amuse and please, and certainly not to teach and preach; but in order to amuse well it must be a finely-balanced creation. . . .'."

The essay adds the idea that a novel is really just a portable play and the best novels strike at the heart. From the writing, the reader must assume that the author knows a lot about writing novels if only because he has so many opinions about them, and indeed, Francis Marion Crawford's works extend to more than 32 volumes from historical novels to mainstream novels to ghost and horror stories. Many of his novels are listed on Amazon for purchase and many more still are available for free on Gutenberg Project as well as Online Books.

This essay strives to state what, insofar as I know, only Ayn Rand definitely stated in her esthetic theory almost fifty years later: a novel is combination of realism and romanticism.

I cannot recommend this work for any particular insights into the novel; it's simply charmingly written and the words are dressed in the intellectual style of a politer society that has long since gone.