Chapter 2 reads Austen’s first novel accepted for publication, Northanger Abbey, in terms of a zero-degree of intelligibility in communicative social exchange. Northanger Abbey presents Catherine Morland’s entry not just to Bath society but into the linguistic public. Throughout the novel, Catherine is subject to stratagems of deceit by her false friends, Isabella and John Thorpe. The latter even makes a coercive (and dishonorably deniable) marriage proposal that Catherine, in a state of absent-minded imaginative distraction, does not so much as uptake as information. J.L. Austin once identified untruth and unclarity as “the birthright” of all speakers. This mock birthright is the arrogation and entitlement of Thorpe. In a striking alignment of this kind of threat with its obverse – a critical investment of interest, if not fascination – Cavell explains his renewed reading of Austen only late in life as an exhausted intimacy with minor characters. In the tedious, packed rooms of Bath where nothing meaningful may happen, or originate, the main couple, Catherine and Henry, broach the possibility of intimacy through the precondition of the apartness of other minds.

Chapter 3, “Sense and Sensibility and Suffering,” begins from the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the problem of other minds. Wittgenstein, like Adam Smith, positions suffering and pain as the paradigmatic experiences in discussion of other minds. (Austin’s paradigmatic feeling is anger.) This chapter deploys a flattened point of view in terms of what it means to be “insensible,” particularly in relation to the non-human paper and ink fictional characters in an “early” Austen novel. It also provides close reading of Sense and Sensibility through a Cavellian exploration of the philosophical problems of skepticism and acknowledgment. Cavell presents his own reading of late Wittgenstein as one of an intimate frustration with the workings of criteria. Such an experience models a necessarily and potentially productive frustration that modern novel readers often report with the main character/trait pairings of Sense and Sensibility. The chapter promotes the interest of otherwise flat writing as modeling forms of resiliency. These critical practices are especially vital to reading Austen’s fiction before her great success in writing novels of inwardness.

The themes from this book require extending into other research areas. First, the history of political thought and ideas: psychology itself is an idea, since modern political thought emanated not only from thinking about ‘man’ but also from what the thinker believed himself to be, qua man: that is, his interior religious and/or psychological status. Second is the history of education, where the importance of the German-language tradition (Schleiermacher, Herbart, Froebel) might lead to studying the idea of universal salvation as a founding discourse of modern schooling, and the ‘developer’ as the individual embodiment of social and national progress. Third comes disability history, concerning institutions and asylums, which has encouraged a single reified notion of developmental disability; a critical conceptual history should make it possible to stand outside this. The fourth area is literature. The novel is the classic literary ‘form’ of a linear developmental narrative, but its historical examples reveal it to be a constant subversion rather than reflection of the developmental idea, even in the typical novel of personal formation (Bildungsroman).

This initial chapter establishes virtual play as a historical practice, and draws its parallel with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments in novel fictionality. It introduces the concept of paracosmic play or worldplay – a form of modern make-believe documented in the juvenilia and biographical archives of Thomas De Quincey, Anna Jameson, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas Malkin, Charlotte Brontë, and Anthony Trollope – as the clearest manifestation of this practice. I review the social scientific work on this phenomenon, track its origins through the history of utopian fiction, and propose its formal significance and theoretical affinities to the nineteenth-century novel. This chapter frames and contextualises the historical argument of the book: that novel fiction comes of age by distinguishing the actual from the virtual.

From Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) to colonial literature at the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, the French novel is marked by the experience of colonialism. It responds to anxieties about individual and national identity as well as about its own generic proximity to scientific narratives, oriental tales and travel writing. Many nineteenth-century novels use colonial love plots in which the – almost always doomed – relationships are situated along an axis stretching from incest, real or symbolic, at one extreme, to racial mixing or miscegenation at the other. The first half of the century also sees novels dealing with political themes in the form of slavery, revolution, or inter-colonial rivalry. In the later decades of the century the novel responds to the rise of scientific racialism and, after 1870, to national anxieties about decadence and the birth rate: colonialism is generally held up as a source of renewal and national re-energisation, though some writers reflect anxiety about cultural and racial mixing in the colonies. French colonial literature seeks to justify itself in theoretical writing, hampered by a sense of inauthenticity compared to its British imperial rival, and frequently tempted towards ironic self-deprecation or doubt.