John Paterson, 78; Expert on English Novels

John Paterson, 78, retired professor of English and expert on the English novel who wrote books about Edwardian behavior, died Friday in a Greenbrae, Calif., hospital after a long illness.

A native of Scotland, Paterson moved to Canada at age 2, grew up in Montreal and graduated from McGill University. He earned a doctorate at the University of Michigan, taught briefly at Princeton and then was on the UC Berkeley faculty from 1956 until his retirement in 1985.

One of his major books was the 1974 “The Novel as Faith: The Gospel According to James, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence and Virginia Woolf,” which a New Yorker reviewer praised as an “urbane, intellectually sophisticated work.”

Paterson’s final book, “Edwardians: London Life and Letters, 1901-1914,” was published in 1996. The Chicago Tribune reviewed it as a “splendid melange of Edwardian manners, mores and gossip.”