Excerpt from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:
Miss Bennet's pleasing manners grew on the goodwill of Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley;
What does "pleasing manners grew on the goodwill" mean?
According to this dictionary, it means "gradually become more pleasurable or acceptable to", but the how can a "manner" becomes more pleasurable to a "goodwill", goodwill is not a person hence can have no feelings, it doesn't seem make sense.
Here's the appropriate sense of goodwill that's being used in the sentence:
[Merriam-Webster]
1 a : a kindly feeling of approval and support : benevolent interest or concern
// people of goodwill
What the sentence is saying is that the more Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley were exposed to Miss Bennet's pleasing manner, the more goodwill they had for her.
In other words, their goodwill increased.
Although grow on is normally used with people, it can also be used with things—it's just not as commonly done.
If you will, you can take the women's goodwill as a kind of poetic entity—a thing in its own right. It's the kind of poetic license that's acceptable in fiction.
Rather than saying that Miss Bennet's pleasing manners grew on them in general, it's saying it grew on their goodwill specifically.
Some of the other senses of the phrase in the linked dictionary definition also contribute to this meaning:
Gradually become more evident.
To be nourished by something and develop in size or quantity.
Those senses of the phrase would normally have the sentence construction in the question reversed, but the meaning is still the same: their goodwill was increased by Miss Bennet's pleasing manner.
In short, it's an unusual way of expressing something that's a kind of hybrid of the normal senses of the phrase, but it still works in the context of the passage.
