Book Smart

Caroline Levine, associate professor of English, “The Serious Pleasures of Victorian Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt,” University of Virginia Press, 2003.

A stray footnote revealed the madwoman in the attic, centerpiece of Charlotte Bronte’s novel “Jane Eyre,” long before the author intended.

“Suddenly my interest in the tensions of the narrative collapsed,” Levine says. “I tried to ignore the knowledge of the future, to forget it, to reinvigorate my own deflated curiosity. But ‘Jane Eyre’ is structured painstakingly around its cannily misleading suggestions. So I started this research by asking why critics and editors consistently have acted as though suspense didn’t matter.”

Levine found that while critics traditionally maintain that readers furiously consume suspenseful plots to see what happens at the end, Victorian writers of suspense viewed it as a disruptive and unsettling world view.

“Suspense throws everything up in the air, You can root easily for the criminal to escape rather than the detective to restore law and order,” Levine says.

During the course of her research, Levine discovered a surprising relationship between Victorian suspense novelists and Victorian scientists.

“Philosophers of science always claimed that experiments always involved suspense: The experimenter had to wait and see whether the test would validate the hypothesis. If scientists weren’t compelled to suspend judgment, they would assume that their prejudices were right and wouldn’t open themselves up to the possibility of unexpected truths,” she says.

This semester Levine is teaching a Victorian poetry class and a survey of British literature from 1800 to the present, a requirement for undergraduate English majors. “They’ll get an earful of suspense when we get to ‘Jane Eyre!'” she promises. She’s also presenting at the department’s “Popular Pleasures” symposium Friday, Oct. 1.

—Barbara Wolff