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T h e C a m b r i d g e C o m pa n i o n to E n g l i s h N ov e l i s t s In this Companion, leading scholars and critics address the work of the most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles (excluding living writers), among them Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The significance of each writer in their own time is explained, the relation of their work to that of predecessors and successors explored, and their most important novels analysed. These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together they describe a strong, developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past three hundred years. This volume is a helpful guide for those studying and teaching the novel, and will allow readers to consider the significance of less familiar authors such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen alongside those with a more established place in literary history. a d r i a n p o o l e is Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book.

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THE CAMBRIDGE C O M PA N I O N TO

E N G L I S H N OV E L I S T S EDITED BY

ADRIAN POOLE

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, uk Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521691574 © Cambridge University Press 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge companion to English novelists / [edited by] Adrian Poole. p. cm. (Cambridge companions to) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-87119-8 (hardback) 1. English fiction–History and criticism–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Poole, Adrian. II. Title. III. Series. pr821.c36 2010 823Ł509–dc22 2009033923 isbn 978-0-521-87119-8 Hardback isbn 978-0-521-69157-4 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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CONTENTS

Notes on contributors

pagevii

Introduction Adrian Poole

1

1 Daniel Defoe THOMAS Keymer

14

2 Samuel Richardson Peter Sabor

31

3 Henry Fielding Jane Spencer

48

4 Laurence Sterne Melvyn New

63

5 Frances Burney Vivien Jones

80

6 Jane Austen Jocelyn Harris

98

7 Walter Scott Alison Lumsden

116

8 Charles Dickens Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

132

9 William Makepeace Thackeray Nicholas Dames

149

10 Charlotte Brontë Patsy Stoneman

165

11 Emily Brontë Heather Glen

180

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Contents 12 Elizabeth Gaskell Brigid Lowe

193

13 Anthony Trollope David Skilton

210

14 George Eliot Jill l. Matus

225

15 Thomas Hardy Penny Boumelha

242

16 Robert Louis Stevenson Adrian Poole

258

17 Henry James Michiel Heyns

272

18 Joseph Conrad Robert Hampson

290

19 D. H. Lawrence Michael Bell

309

20 James Joyce Maud Ellmann

326

21 E. M. Forster Santanu Das

345

22 Virginia Woolf Maria Dibattista

361

23 Elizabeth Bowen Victoria Coulson

377

24 Henry Green Bharat Tandon

393

25 Evelyn Waugh Anthony Lane

407

26 Graham Greene Dorothea Barrett

423

27 William Golding Robert Macfarlane

438

Guide to further reading Index

454 457

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N OT E S O N C O N T R I B U TO RS

d o ro t h e a ba r r e t t teaches literature and writing at New York University at La Pietra and at Syracuse University in Florence. She is the author of Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines (1989) and various essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American literature. She has edited works by George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and others. michael bell is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies and Associate Fellow of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts at the University of Warwick. He has written mainly on literary and philosophical themes, such as primitivism, sentiment, and education, from Enlightenment to modernity, as well as single-author studies on D. H. Lawrence and García Márquez. p e n n y b o u m e l h a was Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities in Australia; she is now Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She has published widely on nineteenth-century writers, realism, and issues of gender and narrative, including Thomas Hardy and Women (1982) and Charlotte Brontë (1990), and is the editor of a Casebook on Jude the Obscure (2000). v i c to r i a c o u l s o n is a Lecturer in American Literature at the University of York. Her publications include Henry James, Women and Realism (2007) and essays on Austen, Charlotte Mary Yonge, and the poetics of material culture in nineteenth-century fiction. Her next book is about happiness in James.

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N o t e s o n c o n t r i b u to rs

n i c h o l as da m e s is Theodore Kahan Associate Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (2001) and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007). santanu das teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London and was formerly a research fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge and at the British Academy, London. He is the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (2006) and the editor of Race, Empire and Writing the First World War (2010). He is presently working on the Commonwealth literary and artistic responses to the First World War, with a focus on India. m a r i a d i bat t i s ta , Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, has written widely on modern literature and film. Her works include Virginia Woolf: The Fables of Anon (1980), First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction (1991), and Fast Talking Dames (2001). Her most recent book is Imagining Virginia Woolf: An Experiment in Critical Biography (2009). ro b e rt d o u g l as - fa i r h u rs t is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2002) and has edited Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books (2006) and Great Expectations (2008) for Oxford World’s Classics. m au d e l l m a n n is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and English at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (1993) and Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page (2004). h e at h e r g l e n is Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hall), Cambridge. Her publications include Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (2002), The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës (ed., 2002), and an edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Tales of Angria (2006). ro b e rt h a m p s o n is Professor of Modern Literature and Head of the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992) and viii

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N o t e s o n c o n t r i b u to rs

Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (2000) and is currently working on Conrad’s Secrets. He has edited various texts by Kipling, Haggard, and Conrad for Penguin. jo c e ly n h a r r i s is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand. She has edited Austen’s favourite book, Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1979) and has written Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (1989, repr. 2003). Her latest book is A Revolution Almost beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (2007). m i c h i e l h e y n s is Professor Emeritus at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century novel and on modern South African fiction. He is the author of Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Scapegoat in English Realist Fiction (1994). He has published four novels and several translations. v i v i e n jo n e s is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Gender and Culture in the School of English, University of Leeds. She has published widely on gender and writing in the period, including, as editor, Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (2000) and Evelina (2002). She contributed an essay on ‘Burney and Gender’ to The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney (2007). t h o m as k e y m e r is Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His books include Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (1992), Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), and the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Robinson Crusoe (2007) and Rasselas (2009). He co-edits Review of English Studies and, with Peter Sabor, the Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. a n t h o n y l a n e is a film critic and staff writer on the New Yorker and author of Nobody’s Perfect (2002), a collection of articles from the magazine. He is also an Academic Associate in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. b r i g i d l ow e is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She has published articles on Dickens and Hardy, as well as a book, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (2007). She is currently enjoying research towards a study of the pleasures of realist fiction. ix

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N o t e s o n c o n t r i b u to rs

a l i s o n l u m s d e n is a Senior Lecturer in English and Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen. She is co-director of the Walter Scott Research Centre and a general editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. She has edited several volumes for the Edinburgh Edition including The Heart of Mid-Lothian and The Pirate. She is currently completing a monograph on Scott. ro b e rt m ac fa r l a n e is a Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is the author of Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007), and Original Copy (2007). j i l l l . m at u s is a Professor of English and Vice-Provost, Students at the University of Toronto. She has published a wide range of articles on Victorian fiction and is the author of Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (1995) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (2007). Her forthcoming Shock and the Victorian Psyche explores the emergence of trauma as a concept in Victorian fiction and psychology. melvyn new Professor Emeritus of English, University of Florida, has been writing on Sterne for the past forty years. Volumes VII and VIII of the Florida Edition of the Works of Sterne, for which he is general editor, are now in press; co-edited with Peter de Voogd, they will contain the correspondence of Sterne. a d r i a n p o o l e is Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His monographs include Gissing in Context (1975), Henry James (1989), and Shakespeare and the Victorians (2003), and he has edited novels by Dickens, James, and Stevenson for Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics. He is one of the general editors of the Complete Fiction of Henry James to be published by Cambridge University Press in thirty volumes. p e t e r sa b o r is Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Director of the Burney Centre at McGill University. His publications on Richardson include (with Thomas Keymer) Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in EighteenthCentury Britain and Ireland (2005). He is also, with Keymer, co-general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, to be published in twenty-five volumes.

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N o t e s o n c o n t r i b u to rs

dav i d s k i lto n is Research Professor in English at Cardiff University. He has written extensively on Victorian literature and edited many of the novels of Trollope for various publishers. He is currently working on meaning production in illustrated texts and is a founding editor of the Journal of Illustration Studies. ja n e s p e n c e r is Professor of English at the University of Exeter. She has published widely on the eighteenth-century novel and on women’s literary history from the Restoration to the nineteenth century. Her books include The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986), Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (2000), and Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon, 1660–1830 (2005). She is currently working on a book on animals in eighteenth-century writing. pat sy s to n e m a n is an Emeritus Reader in English at the University of Hull, where she taught for most of her academic life. She has published widely on the Brontës, including essays for both the Oxford and the Cambridge Companions. Her major monograph is Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1996), and her most recent publication is Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848–1898: An Illustrated Edition of Eight Plays with Contextual Notes (2007). b h a r at ta n d o n is Fellow and Tutor in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (2003); he is currently preparing an annotated edition of Emma for Harvard University Press and a book on echoing and haunting in Victorian fiction. He also reviews contemporary fiction for the Times Literary Supplement.

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