Chapter 18 - Manners

Summary

The near ubiquity of reference to Henry James as a novelist of manners exists in relation to this complication: that James himself, it has been suggested, may have invented the term, using it as a lesser alternative to ‘master-piece’ in his 1866 review of Felix Holt, the Radical. George Eliot’s novels, James suggests, exemplify ‘a kind of writing in which the English tongue has the good fortune to abound – that clever, voluble, bright-colored novel of manners which began with the present century under the auspices of Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen’ (LC-1, 911). What works best in James’s definition of this kind of writing (certainly better, in being more usefully indicative, than ‘clever’ or ‘bright-colored’) is his location of it under the signatures of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, and subsequent critics of the novel have followed his lead, pinpointing that location more closely by triangulating the novels of Austen and Edgeworth with the works of Henry James. If critics tend less frequently to define the novel of manners than to know it when they see it, then they see it when they look at James and Austen. The first reason to discuss James in relation to manners, that is, is that so many people already have done so. And it was crucially a part of James’s task in writing (as it was of Austen’s and of Edgeworth’s) to attend to the daily practices and mores that constitute social relations and social structures as they are lived and experienced – in short, to attend to manners.