Leah Price's book on The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel puts its reviewers in a remarkable dilemma. Few books before now can have drawn such stark attention to the perils of summarizing, the inadequacy of quotation and the subjectivity of the evaluative chunks we slip in between the excerpts we borrow from the text. On decontextualizing quotations, as long ago as 1765 Dr Johnson warned that '[Shakespeare's] real power is not shewn in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen' (78). What hope then for Price's reviewer, who must begin to illustrate his point by lifting a quotation from her book, which is itself a quotation, and furthermore one which contains a summary?

The alternative is to abjure not only reviewing, but scholarly criticism as well, which explains critics' self-interested enforcement of a 'gentleman's agreement' to perpetuate the necessary evil of these synecdochal practices. And leaving aside any question of quotable illustrations, this book succeeds so richly that it would be unbearably ironic to suggest that it disintegrated any attempt to review it - and to recommend it. It is a persuasive and meticulously researched argument on the role played by the anthology, first in shaping the form of the early novel, and later in response to its becoming properly respectable in the 1870s. It explores the pervasiveness of anthologizing at every stage in the novel's development, from the letters 'edited' by Richardson and the passages of verse that punctuate Ann Radcliffe's romances, to the self-penned chapter mottoes used by George Eliot and the extraction of bons mots from her own works - including aphorisms against aphorism - into collections of moral maxims and birthday books. It forces us to ask questions about our own reading practices - even in relation to our reading of it. And finally, it is a delight to read.

The cautious nature of the eighteenth century novel made the epistolary form an ideal means of justifying its existence, albeit with a sideways wink at the deception. Samuel Richardson signed his novels as the 'editor' of letters by many authors, compiled and collected into a continuous narrative only by the skill of one who scanned and selected from disparate parts. This kind of anthologizing lent the somewhat vulgar genre a false sense of legitimacy, as well as the narrative immediacy of the letter. Novels were, moreover, favoured by women readers (a sure sign that the genre was 'low'), and the presence of an authoritative male editor between text and reader maintained the aura of masculine control. The anthologizing didn't stop at that, however, as Richardson oversaw the production of abridgements of his novels (with third-person summaries of excised parts), collections of profound sentiments excerpted from them, and even 'original' works - such as the Meditations of Clarissa - from which selections were 'taken' in the novel, endowing both editor and characters with anthologists' duties. All this shored up the fiction of multiple authorship and the text's place amongst the shared texts of its readers.

Price alerts her reader to so many forms of anthologizing it is surprising to realize we missed them for so long. Thomas Bowdler's Family Shakespeare, notorious for its expurgation of 'words and expressions improper to be pronounced' by a paterfamilias during communal readings of Shakespeare, is an anthology of gaps - no less selected than any 'elegant extracts', but apparent in their absence. Ann Radcliffe slips quotations in at the head of her chapters, and her own poems at intervals throughout the narrative, confounding reviewers who saw such fragmentation as a cry for the parts to be tidily collected together in discrete volumes. By the time we get to the example of George Eliot, the chapter motto ceases to demonstrate merely the author's clever selection of a line or two appropriate to her scheme, because, recognizing the significance of collecting and quoting, Eliot sometimes wrote her own mottoes. Even when she did not, her awareness of the inferences of selecting was strong enough to dissuade her from choosing some lines by Whitman, lest she be assumed to favour him more than she actually did (119).

My feeble summarizing has no space to illustrate Price's arguments on how anthologies have helped to define groups of readers, how nineteenth century critics argued about the right amount of quotation to put in their reviews, or George Eliot's distanced complicity in the anthologizing of her own works - gendering her readership much as Richardson had done a century earlier. But rich discussion abounds, and the research is excellent - cross-referencing all the different editions of Clarissa sounds like the sort of hyperbole one might make up to epitomize extreme feats of scholarship, yet here it is.