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- Jane Austen
Twenty years after Evelina, the novel of femininity took a further step in technique and breadth of design. Miss Austen, who in the last decade of the eighteenth century was writing the novels that were not to be published till after the first decade of the nineteenth, learnt from both her precursors. She was a proper follower of Richardson, but dispensed altogether with the artifice of letters, although the whole of her work is so intimate and particular in expression that it would almost seem to be written in a letter to the reader. - Fanny Burney
Fanny Burney took more material with a lighter hand, stealing away the business of The Tatler, The Spectator, The Citizen of the World, and trying not only to 'draw characters from nature' but also to 'mark the manners of the time.' - Alexandre Dumas
There is a much less terrible pleasure to be had from the works of Dumas. Behind all Hugo's books is the solemnity, behind Dumas' the joy of living, the joie de vivre—the French phrase, although identical, seems better to express it. - Théophile Gautier
Gautier was not pure dreamer. Though the world of his art was as far from the world of Paris, as the world of Mr. Yeats from the world of London or Dublin, he was not a seer, or a poet between whom and reality hung a veil of dreams. He was a solid man, one of whose proudest memories was a blow that registered five hundred and thirty-two pounds on an automatic instrument, the result of daily washing down five pounds of gory mutton with three bottles of red Bordeaux. - Sir Walter Scott
Scott was a part of this revivified world, and his importance in it is not that of its inventor, but of the man who brought so many of its qualities into the art of story-telling that his novels became a secondary inspiration, and moved men as different as Hugo, Balzac, and Dumas, to express themselves in narrative. - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne is one of the earliest story-tellers whom we remember as much for himself as for his books. He is loved or hated, as an essayist is loved or hated, without reference to the subjects on which he happened to write. He wrote in a community for whom a writer was still so novel as to possess some rags of the old splendours of the sage; an author was something wonderful, and no mere business man.