I want to write of the private stories that lie behind our reading of books, taking my own trajectory through English literature as the history I know best but proposing a way of thinking about literature that I believe is every reader’s process. We bring ourselves with all our aspirations and wounds, affinities and aversions, insights and confusions to the books we read, and our experience shapes our responses. I have begun by citing my relation to The Great Gatsby, but the story of reading David Copperfield or Vanity Fair or To the Lighthouse or any of the books discussed in this volume is just as dramatically personal. Young David has an evil stepfather, as did I, and I share in David’s fear and loathing of this figure. The élan of Becky Sharp reminds me of my mother, and I can’t help admiring Thackeray’s witty, resourceful rogue. The yearning of Woolf’s grief-suffused Lily Briscoe for the dead Mrs. Ramsay touches the chord of all the important losses of my life. Of course, reading is more complicated than this finding of biographical parallels. We also read, as one of my students has so well put it, “to escape the relentless monotony of being ourselves” as well as “to return from the experience with a slightly different mind than we had going in.” All that is true, and much else besides, a subtle and magical interaction between the reader and the book that I hope to illuminate.
WHEN I first thought to write a book about reading and literary characters, I had a concept for a more strictly academic study that I called “from orphan to immigrant.” Always attuned to patterns and structure, I saw a succession of figures in the English novel: the orphan of the Victorian period, the “new woman” and the artist of late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century modernism, and the immigrant of late twentieth-century postcolonialism that linked for me in a striking genealogy. Each in turn fits uneasily with his or her society, yet at the same time becomes representative of that society, the protagonist who speaks for a given age, expressing its energy, its fears and aspirations. I was struck, for example, by a passage in Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia in which a theatrical producer explains to the protagonist Karim that “the immigrant is the Everyman of the twentieth century.” Karim has been asked to “play” an Indian—i.e. wear a loin cloth and cultivate an Indian accent—for a theater production of The Jungle Book in which he has landed the leading role of Mowgli. Yet Karim, born in London, sees himself as “an Englishman born and bred, almost.” The Indian identity that goes unnamed creates the “almost.” “Perhaps,” he muses, poising himself on the brink of a modern day picaro’s adventures, “it’s the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored.” He declares himself “ready for anything,” a prime condition for fiction.
As a professor of English literature I had developed courses with one or another of the figures I have named as a thematic focus: the orphan, the new woman, the artist, and the immigrant—these slim but hardy subjects about which the novel at different points in its history has seemed, to borrow a phrase from Henry James, to make “an ado.” But I had always considered them separately—each a discrete literary and cultural phenomenon. In my rethinking, I saw ways that, whatever their differences from one another and their prominence in different periods, they align to serve the same function. Destabilized themselves and destabilizing others around them, moving in their fictional trajectories between margin and center, they are either outsiders seeking to come in or insiders seeking to go out in their quest for a realized personal and social identity. The reader asks what they will make of themselves, how they will change or be changed by the world. Their narratives dramatize the disruptions and reconfigurations of history, the thrills and dangers inherent in the assertion of individualism, the tensions and accommodations between selfhood and society. As we read, our stake in their fictional lives becomes our own lived experience of belonging and not belonging, their dramas our dramas of becoming ourselves in the world. It’s not that readers ever were—or are—preponderantly orphans or immigrants, new women or artists, though some of us may be. But these figures absorb us. I felt that if I could understand their catalytic and galvanizing role in English fiction of the last two centuries, I would come closer to understanding something important about the complexities of culture, the shaping power of fiction, and the impressionable psyches of readers.
Such was the project that grew in my mind: the culmination of a life spent reading, teaching and thinking about English fiction and the major contribution that I hoped to make to my field. The project had all the more urgency for me because it represented a return to scholarship after years spent writing memoir and stories that drew from a personal realm. Parents more often than not are larger-than-life figures, but when the world conspires in giving them this status, it enmeshes the child in a particular way. I was the child of not just one but two well-known people—of course my mother, the Sheilah Graham of Fitzgerald romance and
