ABSTRACT
Henry James served an apprenticeship as a journalist while he established his career as a novelist and his reputation as the father of literary criticism. James's formulations of the superiority of this 'showing' over 'telling' were enthusiastically taken up by percy lubbock, whose The Craft of Fiction of 1926 attempts to offer the yardstick by which to measure all fiction. The importance of this narrator has long been recognised. Edward Dowden, in 1877, writing on George Eliot, said that, 'the form that most persists in the mind after reading her novels is not any of the characters, but one who, if not the real George Eliot, is that second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them'. The invisibility of the historical author, and the visibility of the second self, are contrasted at length. Dramatised narrators equally come in many guises – sometimes observers, sometimes participants.
