Victorian Fiction (PDF)

JOHN SUTHERLAND is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at UCL and has been, for ten years, an annually Visiting Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology, USA. He has published seventeen books, some 30 editions, many articles in learned journals on a variety of subjects - but mostly concentrating on Victorian fiction, the history of publishing, and twentieth-century literature. His most recent books are: Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? (Oxford, 1998), Henry V: War Criminal (with Cedric Watts and Stephen Orgel, Oxford, 1999), The Literary Detective (Oxford, 2000), Last Drink to LA (Short Books, 2001), Reading the Decades (BBC Books, 2002) and Stephen Spender: The Authorized Biography (2004). He also writes a weekly column for the Guardian, and is currently engaged on the Oxford Companion to Popular Fiction.

'General readers and scholars alike have [Sutherland] to thank for providing such a rich compendium of knowledge and clear insight. His book frequenly delights and deserves rereading...Sutherland's focus on the very existence and mechanics of writing, publishing and reading offers a way forward blessedly free from jargon and theory.' - The Use of English

Reviews for the first edition:

'Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers works a series of elegant variations on the theme of the novel as a complex cultural construct...Unflaggingly perceptive, prefigurative - notably in his linking of the Victorian publishing scene and modern arrangements...Sutherland invariably leaves you wanting more.' - D.J. Taylor, Sunday Times

'No one writing today writes better about Victorian fiction' - Jerome McGann

'Sutherland...must know more about Victorian fiction and its background than almost anyone currently writing about it, and this book amply demonstrates his virtuosity...His brilliant analysis in Chapter 3...reads like a spellbinding novel itself...Highly recommended for general audiences, upper-division undergraduates, graduate students and faculty.' - R. T. Van Arsdel, Choice, Sept 1995 (Selected as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Books for 1995)

'...stylish and entertaining...' - Studies in English Literature

'...Sutherland combines meticulous textual scholarship and biographical detail with a broad perspective on the cultural and economic milieux in which Victorian fiction was produced...not since the portrait of 'Pegasus in Harness' in William Makepeace Thackeray's Pendennis has anyone so vividly represented the Victorian publishing industry. With his usual grace and wit, Sutherland here offers another tour of the hectic world of urgent deadlines, clandestine negotiations, and shifting alliances that made Victiorian novels Victorian.' - Bradley Deane, Victorian Studies

'...Sutherland's book [deserves