My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice

The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain.   These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives.   By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them. The novels in this collection include:Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëThe Duke’s Children  by Anthony TrollopeThe Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan DoyleThe Newcomes by William Makepeace ThackerayMiddlemarch  by George EliotDaniel Deronda by George EliotThe Return of the Native by Thomas HardyVanity Fair by William Makepeace ThackerayNorth and South by Elizabeth GaskellBleak House by Charles DickensDavid Copperfield by Charles DickensNew Grub Street by George GissingThe Pickwick Papers by Charles DickensDracula by Bram StokerWuthering Heights by Emily Brontë