Getting Lost in the Novel

Instances abound in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels where characters, particularly female characters, become lost, often moved by overwhelming emotion. Amanda Auerbach delves into the impact of these scenes on the character and the reader. On one level, 'getting lost' can realign a character's and our own sense of self and of social situation, while more broadly these instances reflect arcs within the overall narrative, highlighting easily-missed elements, sometimes even reflecting on our own experiences while reading. The emotions that move characters most powerfully often relate to their psychological needs, which the social conditions of their lives prevent them from meeting or fully acknowledging. These episodes appear across multiple novels in multiple subgenres, including the marriage plot, the gothic novel, the Victorian bildungsroman, and the sensation novel. These episodes collectively reveal how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelistic subgenres developed to help women and working-class readers covertly satisfy their psychological needs.

• Identifies a formerly unremarked type of literary episode through which novels self-consciously reflect on subgenre, providing original insight into how authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought about subgenre distinctions
• Provides an account of the psychological needs that drew historical readers to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British subgenres, inviting compelling connections between readers of the past and of the present
• Explains the novel's development as a product of women's evolving, collective concerns, telling new stories about how historical subgenre novels written mostly by women communicate with one another across time