Book excerpt: The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain. These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives. By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them. The novels in this collection include: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray Middlemarch by George Eliot Daniel Deronda by George Eliot The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell Bleak House by Charles Dickens David Copperfield by Charles Dickens New Grub Street by George Gissing The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Dracula by Bram Stoker Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë