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Reading for the Knowable and the Unknowable: Thinking, Feeling, and Learning in the Victorian Novel

What can we know about ourselves, about those we encounter in our lives, or about those who came before us? Each of the three books here reviewed tackles one or more of these questions within the context of Victorian studies. Notably, these scholars also share a sense of the novel as a form that offers a distinct entree into epistemologies of the nineteenth century and today. The two monographs concern themselves with the unknowable—specifically, the ways in which the novel reveals the Victorians' inability to know fully their own minds or those of others—while the third is an introductory guide that seeks to make the Victorians more readily knowable to twenty-first-century students. Vanessa L. Ryan's study, Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, explores several major Victorian writers in dialogue with the realm of new psychology, demonstrating how these authors, in their plots and through their formal techniques, contemplated those occasions in which thought and action take place beyond the bounds of consciousness. In her book, Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference, Rebecca N. Mitchell brings Emmanuel Levinas's theories on alterity to bear on the relationship between empathy and realism as she argues that a recognition of others' inalienable difference is the basis for intersubjectivity in nineteenth-century literary and visual arts. Both writers relate the inability to know with moral action: Mitchell posits that only when one recognizes the absolute alterity of the other can empathy take