The following are texts in the public domain I often recommend to students and aspiring writers.  Some are long and complex, others relatively short and straightforward.  Together they give a decent impression about the state of novel-writing during the 1800s and early 1900s, which is when a lot of the linguistic and narrative framework of what we now know of as novels was popularized:

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (preface)

E. A. Poe: The Philosophy of Composition

Shklovsky: Art as Technique

Virginia Woolf: Modern Fiction (excerpt)

Kevin Frato –– master’s thesis, University of Stockholm: The Developmental-Play Function of Young Adult Fiction as Seen through Phantastes, The Water Babies, The Chronicles of Narnia, and This Is All