Getting Lost in the Novel
Strategic Confusion in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Amanda Auerbach reveals how subgenres of the British novel developed to help women and working-class readers covertly satisfy their needs.

Amanda Auerbach (Author)

9781009585514, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 August 2025

180 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.5 cm, 0.41 kg

'Auerbach reads with a degree of emotional intuition and sensitivity that is surprisingly rare in our discipline. Getting Lost in the Novel covers an astonishing range of genres, authors and scholars, showing that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels not only register desires that women were unable to express, but also served as a private means by which readers could satisfy or at least begin to recognize those desires in themselves.' Elaine Auyoung, Associate Professor of English, University of Minnesota

Instances abound in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels where characters, particularly female characters, become lost, often moved by overwhelming emotion. Amanda Auerbach delves into the impact of these scenes on the character and the reader. On one level, 'getting lost' can realign a character's and our own sense of self and of social situation, while more broadly these instances reflect arcs within the overall narrative, highlighting easily-missed elements, sometimes even reflecting on our own experiences while reading. The emotions that move characters most powerfully often relate to their psychological needs, which the social conditions of their lives prevent them from meeting or fully acknowledging. These episodes appear across multiple novels in multiple subgenres, including the marriage plot, the gothic novel, the Victorian bildungsroman, and the sensation novel. These episodes collectively reveal how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelistic subgenres developed to help women and working-class readers covertly satisfy their psychological needs.

Introduction
Part I. 'Psychological' Subgenres: 1. Ending up alone with a man in the eighteenth-century marriage-plot Novel
2. Getting carried away in the Victorian bildungsroman
Part II. Popular Subgenres: 3. Absorption and the satisfactions of competence in the gothic novel
4. Mood management in sensation fiction
Conclusion: the limitations and privilege of lostness
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]