Getting Lost in the Novel: Strategic Confusion in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
Amanda Auerbach
(Cambridge University Press, 2025)
In Getting Lost in the Novel: Strategic Confusion in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, Amanda Auerbach identifies episodes of getting lost in four subgenres—the marriage plot novel, the Victorian bildungsroman novel, the gothic novel, and the sensation novel—and discusses the ways in which each episode of getting lost functions as a way for the character, and, by extension, the reader to fulfill unmet psychological needs. These episodes of getting lost and the unmet needs they fill take different shapes in the different subgenres, but they can all be understood as a way for a reader, usually a woman, to experience emotions her assigned social role generally prevents her from accessing. Auerbach argues that readers attribute these emotions to their reading rather than their real lives in an act of “strategic confusion,” which she defines as “choosing to avoid knowing something that one might know if one made an honest effort to reflect on the subject” (Auerbach, 9). According to Auerbach, readers who make use of episodes of getting lost intentionally do not acknowledge that their reading is motivated by a desire to fulfill an unmet psychological need, and they use literature to meet these needs because it offers a level of plausible deniability and a facade of propriety that real life experiences do not.
Getting Lost in the Novel draws heavily on existing scholarship focused on the experiences and motivations of common readers. Auerbach situates her project in relation to others that take “an affect-centered approach that claims lay reading as a legitimate object of scholarly investment,” such as Elaine Scarry, Elaine Auyoung, William Flesch, and Rita Felski, among others (5). Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological retellings in The Promise of Happiness provide a model for the form of Auerbach’s analysis, and social identity theory and mood management theory are a major part of the lens through which Auerbach views her objects of study. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different subgenre and includes both close readings of episodes of getting lost and discussion of how readers might use those episodes to fulfill an unmet psychological need.
There are also multiple pieces of scholarship that Auerbach does not explicitly mention but that I nonetheless see as connected to her work and feel it worthwhile to mention here. Throughout Getting Lost in the Novel, Auerbach emphasizes that reading, specifically choosing what and when to read, is a way for marginalized people to assert some amount of agency, autonomy, and competence while existing in a social role that often denies them of these things. In Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life (2021), Heather Cass White illustrates the ways that reading, specifically reading done by marginalized people, is a threat to capitalism, power, and the status quo because it is a tool for self-actualization and imagining possibilities beyond one’s assigned social role. Auerbach’s analysis of how reading functions on an individual level fits into White’s argument about the function of reading in the social world more broadly. Although the ways in which women’s reading is a threat to power is not an explicit focus of Getting Lost in the Novel, much of the book gestures toward this idea, and understanding Auerbach’s work as a part of a larger conversation about the relationship between reading and power is important to understanding the significance of her arguments.
In her chapter on sensation novels, Auerbach invokes Durkheim’s theory of anomie, although she does not use this term. Instead, she uses the term “restlessness,” which she explains is caused by “industrial modernity” and that “the people who are most likely to feel restless are those whose social roles are not stable or satisfying enough to emotionally fill them in” (Auerbach, 130). This description bears a striking resemblance to anomie, which Durkheim explains as a breakdown of social norms and roles caused by industrialization, which causes feelings of alienation and dissatisfaction. Auerbach’s objects of study predate Durkheim’s work, and she is more focused on individual experiences of reading than she is the broader impacts of reading on the social world, so it is understandable that she does not explicitly mention his theory as a framework for her analysis. Still, I feel it is useful to point out this connection, as I find that understanding the broader ideas about reading and the social world that Getting Lost in the Novel gestures toward is helpful for understanding the specific arguments Auerbach is making.
Auerbach’s close readings are the main strength of Getting Lost in the Novel. She identifies and explicates passages depicting episodes of getting lost with clarity and attention to detail. One example that especially stands out to me is Auerbach’s analysis of Wilkie Collins’ Armadale in her chapter on sensation novels. She thoroughly interprets Midwinter’s episode of getting lost and explicitly connects it back to the chapter’s overarching argument about episodes of getting lost in sensation novels representing restlessness and dissatisfaction with one’s social role. In her close reading of Lydia’s episode of getting lost, Auerbach showcases her attention to detail by noting Collins’ use of the word “dawdle” and illustrating how this word choice indicates that Lydia is using her experience of getting lost to reshape her feelings of restlessness into something more productive. Auerbach explains, “the verb ‘to dawdle’ also recalls that Lydia’s act of writing is more deliberate than the act of dawdling. What [Lydia] is doing is not dawdling but lingering over her restless feelings until she can construe them into emotions that are more productive for further analysis (and, therefore, plotting)” (134). This demonstration of the effect a single word can have on the meaning of a passage is close reading at its best, and it is just one instance of multiple throughout Getting Lost in the Novel.
In addition to adeptly identifying and explicating episodes of getting lost, Auerbach offers valuable insights on the function of literature and reading for women and working class people and the importance of popular reading as an object of study. As a scholar whose work is focused on literary forms often deemed “low brow,” I very much appreciate Auerbach’s declaration that popular subgenres like gothic and sensation novels are legitimate and valuable objects of literary study due in part to their popularity rather than in spite of it. I am especially struck by her assertion that “acknowledging the potential vulnerability of an act of escaping through literature might make it more possible to take a tactful interest in—rather than stigmatize or regard as unworthy of remark—the common act” (Auerbach, 142). Auerbach legitimizes not only oft-dismissed popular subgenres but also the people who read them and their motivations for doing so. While I do feel, as I will discuss in more detail later on, that Getting Lost in the Novel might benefit from taking a greater interest in the experiences of actual readers and being more concretely grounded in the real social world, I also respect that Auerbach clearly expresses the importance of taking an interest in the reading habits of marginalized people and that her framework for analysis is centered in part around this idea.
Another strength of Getting Lost in the Novel is the translatability of Auerbach’s arguments to other periods and genres of literature. Much of my own research is focused on finding connections across period and genre, both in literature itself and in social attitudes surrounding it. I have a particular interest in using earlier forms of literature to understand fanfiction and those who read and write it, and I found many of Auerbach’s arguments to be relevant to this pursuit. For me, one of Auerbach’s most compelling and expandable arguments is in her discussion of the Victorian bildungsroman, which she identifies as featuring episodes of getting lost that fulfill the unmet psychological need of belonging to a social ingroup. According to Auerbach, “a reader [of a Victorian bildungsroman] might find her way into an ingroup that she might not be able to participate in in alternative ways, with the help of literature” (Auerbach, 59). Auerbach’s argument here about how reading a Victorian bildungsroman novel facilitates a feeling of belonging with a social ingroup and thereby fulfills a psychological need that goes unmet in other areas of the reader’s life is reminiscent of Henry Jenkins’ explanations of why women and other marginalized groups flock to fanfiction as a creative outlet and source of community. Although Auerbach does not discuss fanfiction explicitly, her analytical framework is relevant for scholarship like mine that uses historical literary forms to understand current ones.
Another example of the broad applicability of Getting Lost in the Novel is Auerbach’s analysis of early marriage plot novels, which she claims allow readers to fulfill an unmet need for sexual desire that their social role will not allow them to express. This discussion of early marriage plot novels brings to mind more current conversations, inside and outside of academia, about romance novels and the ways they provide an outlet for their readers, usually women, to safely explore sexuality and fantasy and experience desire. By choosing to analyze four different subgenres spanning a wide historical range, Auerbach shows that there is value in treating literature as something that evolves over time but never completely detaches from what came before it. While it can be useful to identify clear lines of demarcation between genres and periods and make meaning of differences and separations, it is, I would argue, equally as important to identify similarities and make meaning of connections across period and genre.
Perhaps because actual experiences of reading and social attitudes surrounding reading habits are a major focus of my own research, my main frustration with Getting Lost in the Novel is that while Auerbach makes well-argued, well-supported claims about how episodes of getting lost function in their respective novels, her claims about the significance of episodes of getting lost to readers of the novels in which they appear often feel under-supported and grounded more in conjecture than concrete evidence. Throughout Getting Lost in the Novel, Auerbach discusses the reasons readers are drawn to episodes of getting lost and the impact those episodes have on readers, but she rarely includes accounts from real readers to support her claims. There are a few real-world examples, such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s recollection of reading Anne Radcliffe and Jane Harrison’s description of reading The Mill on the Floss, but more commonly, Auerbach either uses fictional representations of reading to support her claims about real life readers or simply makes a conjecture about an archetype of woman reader “[she] imagine[s] to have existed” (30) for whom episodes of getting lost are particularly useful for fulfilling unmet needs and how such a reader might have felt or behaved. It could be fair to say that the goal of the project is to identify and close read episodes of getting lost with a focus on their function in the novel and that actual reader experiences are beyond its scope if Auerbach did not present the ways readers use episodes of getting lost as a major part of her argument about the importance of these episodes as objects of literary study. As someone with a particular interest in the relationship between literature and society, I am simultaneously intrigued by many of Auerbach’s claims about the function of reading episodes of getting lost and frustrated by how they seem more grounded in an imagined social world than the real one.
Getting Lost in the Novel will likely be most useful to readers already possessing significant knowledge of the concepts Auerbach discusses. While Auerbach’s arguments focus on popular literary forms and their readers and might therefore be interesting to a non-academic audience, the way she presents them likely makes them inaccessible to anyone inexperienced in reading literary scholarship or unfamiliar with the literary periods and subgenres she deals with. For the most part, Auerbach seems to trust that her readers are aware of the historical and social context of her objects of study and that they will be able to follow her argument despite its sometimes meandering trajectory. Reading Getting Lost in the Novel, I get the sense that Auerbach is speaking to fellow scholars who have already immersed themselves in a similar niche and therefore do not need her to contextualize her arguments. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it does limit the reach and impact of her work to those who are already well-versed in academic writing. For those readers who come to Getting Lost in the Novel already equipped to understand it, Auerbach offers an original and useful framework for using episodes of getting lost to find one’s way through a novel.