“Wuthering Heights, however it may appear in retrospect,demands a reading of the utmost intensity, the feeling present in the writing seems to seek a matching response in the reading. If we turn from the story that Emily Brontë tells to the kind of story that Hardy tells, we find a markedly different kind of reader being called into being, a reader who is to be drawn not so much into an intensity of response, but rather into a continual oscillation betweenintensity of involvement and contemplative detachment”

“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'.”

“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.”

“The first unanalysed impression that most readers receive from Jane Eyre is that it has a very violent atmosphere. If this were simply the effect of the plot and the imagined events then sensation novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto or Mrs Radcliffe's The Mystery of Udolpho ought to produce it even more powerfully.But they do not. Nor do they even arouse particularly strong reader responses. Novelists like Charlotte Brontë or D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, are able quite quickly to provoke marked reactions of sympathy or hostility from readers. The reason, apparently, isthat the narrator's personality is communicating itself through the style with unusual directness.”

“Whether he chooses a 'scholarly' or a 'popular' edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice that a given text is intellectually taxing—that he is likely to need help. Such apparatus is likely tobe a positive disincentive to casual reading. But a cheaper edition may offer interference of another kind. Reminders, in words or pictures, of Julie Christie's Bathsheba Everdene or Michael York's Pip can perhaps create a beguiling sense of accessibility. But theymay also pre-empt the imaginative responses of the reader.”

“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.”

“Recognising such dimensions implicit to the reading experience can distract from the immediacy of our response; it can substitute literary archaeology for novelistic reality. That is one pole. But the other extreme is equally limiting. By failing to realise the issues involved in communicating with fictional modes that are differentto our own, in effect we do not read in the fullest sense. Between intellectual pedantry and cultivated ignorance I would pose a third approach to reading—that of the informed imagination. After occupying this position true evaluation can begin.”