Says a friend who was with him while he was writing Hypatia: 

“He took extraordinary pains to be accurate.  We spent one whole day in searching the four folio volumes of Synesius for a fact he thought was there, and which was found there at last.”

The writer of perhaps the greatest historical novel in the English language, The Cloister and the Hearth, was what one might call a glutton for thoroughness.  Of himself Charles Reade has said:  “I studied the great art of fiction closely for fifteen years before I presumed to write a line.  I was a ripe critic before I became an artist.”  His commonplace books, on the entries in which and the indexing he was accustomed to spend one whole day out of each week, cataloguing the notes of his multifarious reading and pasting in cuttings from newspapers likely to be useful in novel-building, completely filled one of the rooms in his house.  In his will he left these open to the inspection of literary students who cared to study the methods which he had found so serviceable.

To name one or two more English novelists:  Thomas Hardy’s novels would seem to have the slow growth of deep-rooted things.  His greatest work, The Return of the Native, was on the stocks for four years, though a year seems to have sufficed for Far from the Madding Crowd.

The meticulous practice of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of his method is worth catching again.

The first draft of a story [records Mr. Charles D. Lanier], Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne.  When all the colours were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably penned it himself, with exceeding care....  If the first copy did not please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft.  In his stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared himself for these workmanlike methods by the practice of rewriting his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories again.

Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, spirit of the true artist to all his work, but The Scarlet Letter was written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ had been in Hawthorne’s mind for many years.  The story of its beginning is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar.  Incidentally, too, it witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife.

One wintry autumn day in Salem, Hawthorne returned home earlier than usual from the custom-house.  With pale lips, he said to his wife:  “I am turned out of office.”  To which she—­God bless her!—­cheerily replied:  “Very well! now you can write your book!” and immediately set about lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his work.

The book was The Scarlet Letter, and was completed by the following February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing “immensely” on it day after day, nine hours a day.  When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had anything for him to publish.