went on

James’s examples of novelists using characters from novel to novel are :

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), whose massive sequence of interconnected novels and stories have the collective title Comédie humaine and were planned in advance

William Thackery (1811-1863), who followed descendants of the Esmond family of The history of Henry Esmond (1852) in his The Virginians (1857-1859)

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), with the ‘Barsetshire’ novels, a whole series examining different central characters among a group in his fictional county of that name, and the ‘Palliser’ series, centred around that family

and Émile Zola (1840-1902), creator of Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893), a sequence of 20 novels following two families under the French Second Empire