“Discussions of the effects of serial publication of Victorian novels on their authors and readers1 usually draw attention to the author's peculiar opportunities for cliff-hanging suspense, as, for instance, when Thackeray has Becky Sharp counter old Sir Pitt's marriage proposal at the end of Vanity Fair's fourth number with the revelationthat she is already married, and the reader must wait a month before the husband's identity is revealed. Or it may be pointed out how the author can modify his story in response to his readers' complaints or recommendations, as when Trollope records in hisAutobiography how he wrote Mrs Proudie out of the Barchester Chronicles after overhearing two clergymen in the Athenaeum complaining of his habit of reintroducing the same characters in his fiction.”

“Nowhere is the sense of medium felt more strongly, even by the casual reader, than in a story about to end. For the novelist the problem is no longer how to tell his tale, but how to close it down; how to switch imaginative energies which have been used in sustaining the tale, into energies which will not just stop it, but will resolve it. The process of telling must be made to predicate itsown conclusion. For the reader, in sight of an ending, the mode of attention shifts, the rhythm alters, and a pressure of significance begins to build up behind the closing chapters. The pace of the narrative begins to slow, the 'ever after' looms, past and present emerge in ever sharper juxtaposition. It is this heightened attentionto the medium that characterises the ending and we are not surprised to find that for some novelists 'endings' seem to play false to the narrative which leads to them. 'Conclusions are the weak points of most authors', George Eliot wrote, 'but some of the fault must lie in the very nature of a conclusion which is at best a negation'.”

“If a writer has to find a rhythm if his novel is to come 'right', a rhythm which he may well discover in the rhythm of an individual sentence, then likewise a reader has to find a corresponding rhythm in his reading, which may equally well be discovered in responding to local effect.The intimacy of this relationship between writer and reader is well caught in a recent observation made by Graham Greene, 'Novels should always have, if not dull, then at least level patches. That's where the excessive use of film technique, cutting sharply from intensityto intensity is harmful. . . . The writer needs level passages for his subconscious to work up to the sharp scenes . . . and the reader needs those level patches too, so that he can share in the processes of creation—not by conscious analysis, but by absorption?'To reflect on the wide-ranging effects of rhythmin reading would seem to be one way of making a start on tracing that obscure route that leads from 'absorption' to 'conscious analysis'.”

“Reading Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë after Jane Eyre is a curious experience. The subject of the biography is recognisably the same person who wrote the novel, but the effect of the two books is utterly different. The biography is indeed depressing and painful reading. It captures better, I believe, than any anysubsequent biography the introverted and puritan pessimist side of Charlotte Brontë, and conveys the real dreariness of the world of privation, critical discouragement and limited opportunity thatso often made her complain in her letters that she felt marked out for suffering.Jane Eyre, on the other hand, is exhilarating reading, partly because the reader, far from simply pitying the heroine, is struck by her resilience, and partly because the novel achieves such an imaginative transmutation of the drab. Unlike that of Jane Austen's Fanny Price or Dickens's Arthur Clennam or John Harmon, JaneEyre's response to suffering is never less than energetic. The reader is torn between exasperation at the way she mistakes her resentments and prejudices for fair moral judgements, and admiration at the way she fights back. Matthew Arnold, seeking 'sweetness and light' was repelled by the 'hunger, rebellion and rage' that heidentified as the keynotes of the novel. One can see why, and yet feel that these have a more positive effect than his phrase allows. The heroine is trying to hold on to her sense of self in a world that gives it little encouragement, and the novel does put up a persuasive case for her arrogance and pugnacity as the healthier alternativesto patience and resignation. That the book has created aworld in which the golden mean seems such a feeble solution is both its eccentricity and its strength.”

“In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted.”

“Novels begin and end with, consist of, and indeed in one sense are nothing but voices. So reading is learning to listen sensitively, and to tune in accurately, to varying frequencies and a developing programme.From the opening words a narrative voice begins to createits own characteristic personality and sensibility, whether it belongs to an 'author' or a 'character'. At the same time a reader is being created, persuaded to become the particular kind of reader the book requires. A relationship develops, which becomes the essential basis of the experience. In the modulation of the fictive voice,finally, through the creation of 'author' and 'reader* and their relationship, there is a definition of the nature and status of the experience, which will always imply a particular idea of ordering the world.So much is perhaps familiar enough, and a useful rhetoric of Voice' has developed. Yet I notice in my students and myself, when its vocabulary is in play, a tendency to become rather too abstract or technical, and above all too spatial and static. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves what it can be like to listen to close friends,talking animatedly and seriously in everyday experience, in order to make sure that a vocabulary which often points only to broad strategies does not tempt us to underplay the extraordinary resourcefulness,variety and fluctuation of the novelist's voice.”

“Indeed, and crucially so, the serial form tookthe control of the novel away from the reader and left him in an imagined space that could not be thought of in terms of the physical space still to be read. At the end of each instalment the reader would contemplate a vacuum, an 'end' which looked forward to a continuing verbal space which he could not measure.He might speculate but he could not know.”