Section 1 of the Writing of Fiction. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox .org. Read by Betty B. The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton. In General 1. To treat of the practice of fiction is to deal with the newest, most fluid, and least formulated of the arts. The exploration of origins is always fascinating, but the attempt to relate the modern novel to the tale of Joseph and his brethren is of purely historic interest. Modern fiction really began when the action of the novel was transferred from the street to the soul, and this step was probably first taken when Madame de Lafayette, in the seventeenth wrote a little story called La Princesse de Cleve, a story of hopeless love and mute renunciation in which the stately tenor of the lives depicted is hardly ruffled by the exultations and agonies succeeding each other below the surface. The next advance was made when the protagonists of this new inner drama were transformed from conventionalized puppets, the hero, the heroine, the villain, the heavy father, and so on, into breathing and recognizable human beings. Here again a French novelist, the Abbé Prévost, led the way with Manon Lescaut, but his drawing of character seems summary and schematic when his people are compared with the first great figure in modern fiction, the appalling Neveu de Rémo. It was not too long after Diderot's death that the author of so many brilliant tales peopled with eighteenth -century puppets was found, in the creation of that one sordid, cynical, and desolately human figure to have anticipated not only Balzac but Dostoevsky. But even from Manon Lescaut and the Neveu de Rémo, even from Lesage, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Scott, modern fiction is differentiated by the great dividing geniuses of Balzac and Stendhal. Say for that one amazing accident of Diderot's, Balzac was the first not only to see his people, physically and morally, in their habit as they lived, with all their personal hobbies and infirmities, and make the reader see them, but to draw his dramatic action as much from the relation of his characters to their houses, streets, towns, professions, inherited habits and opinions, as from their fortuitous contacts with each other. Balzac himself ascribed the priority in this kind of realism to Scott, from whom the younger novelist avowedly derived his chief inspiration. But as Balzac observed, Scott, so keen and direct in surveying the rest of his field of vision, became conventional and hypocritical when he touched on love and women. In deference to the wave of prudery which overswept England after the vulgar excesses of the Hanoverian court, he substituted sentimentality for passion and reduced his heroines to keepsake insipidities, whereas in the firm surface of Balzac's realism there is hardly a flaw, and his women, the young as well as the old, are living people, as much compact of