My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice ed. by Annette Federico

Abstract

Reviewed by: My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice ed. by Annette Federico Kathy Rees (bio) Annette Federico, editor. My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice. U of Missouri P, 2020. Pp. xiii + 316. $36.00. ISBN 9780826222077 (hb). How can the essay, traditionally a personal and subjective form, with its graceful and often witty expression, bear the weight of today's academic literary criticism, which tends to be impersonal, jargonheavy, and combative? This question has gathered increasing momentum over the past four decades, and Annette Federico's new collection of essays makes an elegant contribution to the debate. Federico and her fourteen contributors write creatively about well-known works of fiction, producing essays that are critically authoritative but also engagingly personal. Each essay operates on two levels, integrating an interpretation of a critical aspect of a specific Victorian novel with a sense of the essayist's own cerebral and reflective journey. Notably, Federico's volume is book-ended by commentary from two of the most vocal advocates of the personal essay in academia: Jane Tompkins writes the foreword and G. Douglas Atkins echoes her sentiments in his dust-cover endorsement. Federico has challenged her contributors to select one text over which they feel ownership, to explore "my Victorian novel." For many, this text is not necessarily a long-cherished favorite, but a novel read many times, researched from many angles, taught, presented, published on, and pondered, usually over several years. It may be a novel which, to borrow Dickens's description of his feelings about David Copperfield, is difficult "to get sufficiently far away from … to refer to it with … composure" (Dickens 11). The essayists, all accomplished Victorianists, express their engagement with their subjects – Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Trollope, Conan Doyle, Thackeray, Eliot, Hardy, Gaskell, Dickens, Gissing, and Stoker – in ways that are liberating, or at times discomposing, for both author and reader. Three essayists have chosen to write about a novel by Dickens. Catherine Robson explores erotic relationships in Bleak House, considering in particular, "What Esther Thinks about Sex," and more broadly, how Esther's sexual awareness helps us to understand the vexed question of the novel's dual narration (193). Lillian Nayder offers a refreshing reading of the breachof-promise case in Pickwick Papers in light of her experience as a graduate researcher positioned on the edge of an academic "exclusively male club" (252). Michael Flynn recalls his own graduate-school encounter with David Copperfield and compares it with the perceptions of current-day students who read the world through a virtual lens. Since the time of Michel de Montaigne, essays have often sported enigmatic or poignant titles, and Flynn's "Liking David Copperfield" is no exception. If your first reading of that word "liking" assumes an act of appreciation, then I should remind you [End Page 212] that "to like" something on social media is a form of communication used by millions of people every day to signal their validation of something or someone by a single click. In this context, then, Dickens is being positioned onto a new kind of "platform." It is striking how the voice and performance of each essayist situates them in one's imagination. I envisage Robson in a seminar with her peers, energetically arguing her case, and periodically referring to some wellthumbed philosophical or literary critical authority from a pile on the desk. My impression of Nayder dates to the 1980s basement of the Dickens House (now Museum) on Doughty St., seated around a large table in the company of box-files, tea-cups, and fellow-researchers. Flynn, by contrast, strides around a classroom, listening intently to his students. The presence of the essayist is so compelling that the customary "Notes on Contributors" constitute a pale afterthought. Space limits my more detailed comments to Robson and Flynn's essays; these are chosen because they provide interesting parallels in terms of the reader's response. Robson wears her learning lightly and has an enviable knack of making her readers feel clever, keeping them involved in the complex strands of her intense discussion. Her elliptical references to Bleak House, her assumptions of shared knowledge, of not needing to...