Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel

What is it that relates Austen and Trollope, Bronte and Dickens to Eliot, James, Hardy and Ford? How do novels like Pride and Prejudice and Barchester Towers and novels like Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations become part of Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Jude the Obscure and Parade's End? For Joseph Wiesenfarth, the relationships and connections are bound up in what he calls Gothic Manners. His argument is that the salient elements of two genres, that of the novel of manners and that of the new Gothic novel, come together and form a synthesis which accounts, in good part, for the greatness of classical English fiction.