Lennard J. Davis ends the special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction entitled ‘Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel’ (12/2-3, 2000) by deciding that ‘all of us are calendrically obliged to take stock of the work done on the novel and in novel theory, and to decide, in Lenin’s favourite phrase, “what is to be done?” if there is anything more to be done’ (p. 480). After his own stock-taking, Davis bleakly concludes that the scenario at the end of the twentieth century is ‘dour’: ‘novel theory can only iterate itself by reiterating tautologies about fictionality and narrative’ (p. 498). Yet he cannot accept that ‘we have reached a dead end and can go no further’ (p. 499). Instead, calling for ‘a conceptual leap that might allow another narrative’, he believes that ‘For the novel, its end is in its beginning, and the seeming end of novel theory may only be this beginning’ (p. 499).

Davis’s optimism is justified by Leah Price’s dazzlingly inventive The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, which gives novel theory an original turn at the start of the twenty-first century. Price executes with elegance and dexterity not one, but many ‘conceptual leaps’ as she charts the development of the anthology and its influence on the form of the novel. She is able to add a new and compelling narrative to the congested ‘rise of the novel’ field by neatly sidestepping the vexed question of where to locate the novel’s ‘rise’ and concentrating instead on how it stratifies its readership. Price’s central thesis, that ‘Far from levelling class or gender distinctions…the novel has internalized and even reinvented them’ (p. 7), is supported by meticulous attention to the ever-shifting way in which the anthology (and its related form, the abridgement) has differentiated between those who read for ‘story’ and those who read for ‘sentiment’, those who ‘skim’ and those who ‘skip’.

Price takes Samuel Richardson and George Eliot as the beginning and end points of her narrative, detailing the former’s ‘self-aggrandizing auto-anthologizing’ (p. 107) and the latter’s ‘ambivalence about the anthology’ (p. 135), especially towards the George Eliot Birthday Book (1878), which was edited by her most devoted anthologizer, Alexander Main. Price demonstrates that in spite of her reluctance to be associated with this volume, Eliot’s later novels were, like Richardson’s, not only redefined by the anthology but also influenced by its structure. She is also concerned with the ways in which characters anthologize; some of her sharpest insights come in her discussion of the ethical issues raised by Richardson’s characters’ obsessive quoting of each other, which focuses in particular on the expanded role given to the obnoxiously quotative Brand in Clarissa’s third edition of 1751 (pp. 27-35). The inclusion of The History of Sir Charles Grandison in the argument is rare and heartwarming. Even though Price, in line with critical fashion, seems less than riveted by the novel (explaining at one point just why it is ‘so boring’ (p. 43), her section on the proliferation of wills within it (pp. 42-8) ties in shrewdly with her points about the complications of ownership in the epistolary novel, and ‘the long-standing tension between Richardson’s self-presentation as editor and as author’ (p. 47).

Price’s perspicacity is not limited to her discussions of Richardson and Eliot. The book is sprinkled with a number of other fine, elegantly argued, sections, for example on how the anthology plays with genre, on its influence on the Gothic novel (especially Radcliffe), on the editing and anthologizing of Shakespeare, on female reading and anthologists’ constructions of gender, and on the inevitable place of anthologies in schools and universities today. As this list would suggest, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel takes on a structure similar to the texts with which it is concerned. One of Price’s cleverest points is that criticism can be viewed as a kind of anthologizing: ‘(given that no argument about Clarissa or Middlemarch can appeal to more than synecdochal evidence), extracts underwrite the discipline of literary criticism as we know it’ (p. 2). Shot through with illuminating, often brilliant, gems, her own book exhibits to a heightened degree the ‘lapidary’ quality (to use one of her favourite words) of the anthologies and novels she discusses, appearing at times to consist, in Brand’s words, of a ‘glorious string of jewels’ (p. 35).

This has its disadvantages as well as advantages. As Price says of anthologies, ‘what they omit is as crucial as what they include’ (p. 77), and throughout this richly condensed book there are frustrating moments when an argument is not taken further or a tightly woven paragraph not unraveled and expanded. Here I will pick up on just two such examples. In a postscript to the first chapter Price attempts to shed light on ‘the riddle of the death of the epistolary novel’ (p. 7). She charts the progression in Redgauntlet ‘from letter to omniscient narrative’ (p. 55), and argues that, for Scott, the epistolary mode represents, like the ballad form, a form of obsolescence, allowing contemporary readers of this novel to ‘measure their difference from the readers of the 1740s’ (p. 62). This seems to me to raise more riddles than it solves. What exactly was it about the epistolary novel which made it seem obsolete? To what extent does its style infiltrate that of its ‘successors’? Should we really be speaking of its ‘death’ at all? Price enters a second minefield when describing the transition to ‘omniscient narrative’. She frequently refers to the linking editorial sections in abridgements, anthologies, and novels as ‘retrospective, omniscient narration’ (p. 8), claiming that they replace the multi-voicedness of their main texts with ‘a single impersonal voice’ (p. 28). Yet free indirect discourse allows for the possibility that the apparently ‘impersonal’ material of anthologies, and novels such as Clarissa, is coloured by characters’ voices and perspectives. Price’s criticism of Main for his ‘insensitivity to free indirect discourse’ in ‘misattributing to the “propria persona” statements that the novels themselves locate in the perspective of a character’ (p. 108) unfortunately draws attention to her own vulnerability to the same charge.

Another genre which Price compares to the anthology is the book review. This form also ‘alternates plot summary with synecdochal excerpts’ (p. 96) and ‘depend[s] on a gentleman’s agreement to take the parts of a work for the whole’ (p. 2). In a section devoted to ‘The Ethics of the Review’ (pp. 137-49) Price shows how Marian Evans and others question ‘the evidentiary value of quotation’ in Victorian reviews, and claims that twentieth-century reviewers and critics inherited similar ‘doubts about their own function’ (p. 145). ‘In acknowledging their kinship with anthologists,’ she writes, ‘reviewers and biographers questioned their own claim to be producers of new texts rather than reproducers of others’ (p. 145). In this case, this particular reviewer is happy to admit his anthological kinship. I end with some of my favourite ‘jewels’ from this provocative, quirky, highly quotable book: ‘Biography memorializes more than dead people; it also provides a resting-place for obsolete forms’ (p. 52); ‘Although readers often remember Mansfield Park as a novel about plays, it is rarely thought of as a reflection on anthology-pieces’ (p. 79); ‘Like the massy doors that block so many subterranean passageways in the course of so many gothic heroines’ escapes, the epigraphs and inset poems [in Radcliffe’s novels] cut readers off from the next chapter or the next event’ (p. 96).