Reviewed by: Vision and Character: Physiognomics and the English Realist Novel by Eike Kronshage Rosemary Jann (bio) Vision and Character: Physiognomics and the English Realist Novel, by Eike Kronshage; pp. x + 230. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £92.00, $149.95. Eike Kronshage's Vision and Character: Physiognomics and the English Realist Novel examines the intersection between literary realism and physiognomics (following the Oxford English Dictionary: "the art or practice of judging character from facial or physical characteristics") (OED Online qtd. in Kronshage 22). The author argues that the validity of literary physiognomics depended upon the endorsement of key tenets of literary realism. Its rise and fall over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was shaped not by the fluctuating credibility of physiognomy as a (pseudo)science, but rather by changing assumptions about what was knowable about character. For Kronshage, the defining trait of realism is the belief that the true nature of the world and of individuals can be discerned by close observation and description of their "visible exterior"; thus, in realist novels "character is primarily revealed through detailed physiognomic portraiture" (2). In pursuit of this thesis, he proceeds to examine the treatment and function of literary portraiture in six novelists, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Kronshage's claims are for the most part laid out with admirable clarity. The study is widely-researched and is particularly valuable in incorporating German philosophical debates over physiognomy during the period covered. Yet its success as a whole will depend upon how adequate the reader finds its rather limited definition of realism. The author acknowledges that character means a "full, coherent description of an everyday character's inner life: intellectual capacity, emotional state, behavioral disposition, morality, and so on," and that such focus on "psychology and inner character does not necessarily demand, or even require, an outer, visual dimension" (6). But he considers this point refuted by the claims that vision "also encompasses sensory perception, as a way in which the character regards the (visible) world" and that since "Victorian science and literature revolved around a strong belief that truth was essentially visual . . . the truth of character was to be detected through visual observation and exact description" (6). This questionable focus exclusively on the visual leaves [End Page 471] untouched much of the detailed examination of psychology that shapes characterization in the realist novel. The author's choice of writers is also problematic. Determined to show that literary physiognomics was not confined to minor writers, Kronshage deliberately chooses Austen, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad from the Great Tradition and adds Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Woolf. But this leaves him with only one writer—Brontë—who was a thorough believer in physiognomics and several who are not realists according to his definition. His project in fact focuses far more on the failures and inadequacies of literary physiognomics than on its successful practice. His treatment of Austen's Emma (1815) illustrates the limits of his definition of realism. He notes rightly how little physical description adds to the understanding of individuals in her fiction but goes on to reduce Austen's analysis of character—"understood as encompassing the social, moral, emotional, and intellectual aspects of human life"—to a mere comedy of manners that reinforces social hierarchy by letting dress, money, and good etiquette (which often entails dissembling one's true feelings) stand in for character (35). This surely does an injustice to Austen's insightful investigations of psychological error and development and to her inquiry (in other novels if not in Emma) into the ways in which social worth does not always align with wealth. The Brontë chapter succeeds best in illustrating the ways in which physiognomics functions as a key to character. The author persuasively shows how physiognomic interpretation gives William Crimsworth power over others in The Professor (1857) and signals the affinity between Lucy Snowe and M. Paul in Villette (1853). For Brontë, as for Johann Kaspar Lavater, the leading proponent of nineteenth-century physiognomics, valid interpretation is available only to an intellectual elite. Unlike Lavater, who promoted physiognomy as a means "to promote knowledge and love of mankind," Brontë's characters employ it as...