The novel of manners is a work of fiction that re-creates a social world, conveying with detailed observation the complex of customs, values, and mores of a stratified society. The behavioural conventions (manners) of the society dominate the plot of the story, and characters are differentiated by the degree to which they meet or fail to meet the uniform standard of ideal social behaviour, as established by society.
The Novel of Manners: Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1779), by Frances Burney.
The French novelist Honoré de Balzac was a founder of literary realism, of which the novel of manners is a subgenre.
Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded, followed by Cecilia (1782). Most of her stage plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889, forty-nine years after her death.
Portrait by her cousin Edward Francis Burney
Evelina, Volume II, 4th edition (1779)
Print of Burney, 1782
Bodleian Libraries, Playbill of Drury Lane Theatre, Tuesday, March 10, 1795, announcing The merchant of Venice &c.