This most democratic of art forms became for a time the most ideologically contested. Although the debate over canon formation that dominated English Literature departments in the late 1980s and 1990s has lost much of its intensity, the assertion of value continues to make many academics anxious. The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists reassures potential readers that, ‘These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together ... describe a strong, developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past three hundred years.’ Yet if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, chances are it is one. All these essays address, with varying explicitness and success, why we should bother with these twenty-seven authors and not with others. Such judgements are not eternal, however, and the entries on Laurence Sterne and Frances Burney, for example, make clear the changing fortunes of their critical reputations, each resuscitated by new trends in literary scholarship.

The better entries do not demand familiarity with the subject’s work, but inspire the creation of a personal Must Read list. Nicholas Dames’s essay on William Thackeray is excellent, astutely investigating Thackeray’s fondness for servant-narrators and his suggestion that snobbery is a characteristic of the modern individual across all social classes. Dames gives a fascinating analysis of ‘cynical reason’ in Thackeray’s fiction, a sensibility emerging from a feeling of balked agency whose most emblematic expression is a yawn.

Brigid Lowe’s entry on Elizabeth Gaskell is an engaging discussion of the significance of digressive detail in the realist tradition. She compares Gaskell with the narrator of Cranford (1851) who feels ‘grieved’ by wasted butter scraps and whose ‘foible’ is the frugal collection of bits of string: ‘So too Gaskell ... cherishes the skeins and rags of human existence and twists them into narrative. Hers is an imagination that cannot bear to see the knotted details of life cut through by abstraction: its patient thrift allows every little fold of a tangled reality.’ Lowe suggests that the impulse of Victorian fiction ‘not only to observe, but also to amass, record, preserve, recover, redeem’ is a response to the sense of loss accompanying rapid social change.

There are fine examples of the revelatory power of close reading in Bharat Tandon’s attention to Henry Greene’s prepositions and in Robert MacFarlane’s examination of William Golding’s syntax. The subtle, critical intelligence of Anthony Lane, film critic with The New Yorker, makes for a delightful piece on Evelyn Waugh (Lane describes him as ‘creating, as though by reflex, and as much for his own enjoyment as for that of others, unceasing miniature narratives of comic ferocity’). Essays such as these, marked by intellectual verve, and a pleasure to read, are evidence of what is possible for contemporary literary criticism.

Fundamentally, this collection affirms Milan Kundera’s argument that there is a way of knowing unique to the novel, a particular kind of intelligence which emerges through the representation of character. The history of the novel is at the same time a history of changing notions of the self and of perception. The understanding of mind and emotion, of identity itself, shifts markedly from Richardson to Eliot to Joyce, and, in many instances, the insights of these novelists precede and exceed those of disciplines such as philosophy or psychology.

These discoveries were not made in isolation, and there is an unavoidable absurdity in any history of the novel which limits itself by geography, as The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists does. The truth is it simply cannot, and includes twentieth-century masters who were neither born nor raised within its designated boundaries of the British Isles: Joseph Conrad and Henry James. The chapter on Conrad relays how he and his friend Ford Madox Ford would drive about the Kent countryside searching for the Flaubertian mot juste for the passing landscape; a lovely illustration of the fundamental fiction of national borders when considering an international art form such as the novel.

Necessarily, the mass of fictional conventions known as realism is a recurring concern of these essays. James Wood, one of the best contemporary critics of the novel, though not featured in either of these Cambridge Companions, has written that, ‘The real is the atlas of fiction, over which all novelists thirst ... the novel’s insistent preoccupation from the beginning of the form.’ Of course, as the understanding of reality changed, so did the techniques of realism. Classical realism is associated most closely with the liberal humanist tradition and the great novelists of the nineteenth century, but the argument can be made that the modernists were realists too, only that they saw reality in a new way. An orderly, knowable universe had fragmented into a subjective impressionism. Leopold Bloom’s constant digression strikes contemporary readers as realistic, as does Clarissa Dalloway’s awareness of the momentous presence of the past in the most ordinary details of life.

This is not to underestimate the tectonic shift that occurred as the ‘large baggy monsters’ of Victorian fiction, as Henry James called them, collapsed under the modernist assault. Maria Dibattista says in her essay on Virginia Woolf, ‘So successful was the modernist revolution in changing our ideas about fiction that we now tend to forget how complete was her refusal of the novelistic tools and conventions she had inherited.’ Or to use Woolf’s own terms: ‘no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors in slavish imitation of the fashion of the hour.’ It is Woolf who stands out as the key modern figure in the English novel, reappearing across these essays as both exemplar of the twentieth-century revolution in fiction and as a uniquely supple and intelligent theorist of it.

A chronological discussion of novelists inevitably raises the question of progress. Is there a history of the novel to which some authors contribute, and some do not? In one sense, yes, as the essays on Woolf’s and Joyce’s narrative experiments make clear, particularly when contrasted with those on Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, authors who determinedly shunned aesthetic innovation. As Waugh remarked in a 1963 interview, ‘Experiment? God forbid!’

But historical significance is not the whole story. The cave paintings at Lascaux are not less powerful than Picasso’s Guernica; Homer’s account of Achilles’ grief is not less affecting than Mrs Ramsay’s death in To the Lighthouse. Santanu Das’s piece on E.M. Forster challenges the critical commonplace that newness is best. ‘Though periodic attempts are made to claim him as “modernist” and though his novels register the shock of modernity – motor cars, urbanisation, colonialism – he retains an angular relation to modernism,’ writes Das. He argues that instead of radical experimentation, Forster’s value lies in his psychological and spiritual subtlety. Das asks the important question, ‘What are the languages in criticism to address emotions such as love and longing and pleasure, which define our understanding of Forster and our experience of reading more generally and can go beyond concepts such as “narrative” or “modernism”?’

The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists does not consider living novelists and thus ends not with a bang but a whimper. After the modernist efflorescence there is a sudden decline, and none of the later essays convinces that authors such as Waugh, Greene, or Golding are of the same significance as their predecessors. The diminution from early giants of the novel speaks of an overall contraction in the form – its vitality, ambition and cultural importance. The air becomes one of retreat, a dour conservatism reigns.

During this period, the novel’s energy largely passed to the United States, whose novelists, Woolf conceded in a 1925 essay, were now, like Elizabethans, ‘coining new words’. James Wood reflects, ‘It was as if in 1945, a treaty were signed that simply ended verbal and formal ambition in English writing for thirty years.’ It was not until the 1980s that the English novel reinvigorated itself with the generation of Rushdie, Amis and Ishiguro.

Although it has the advantage of considering contemporary writers such as these, The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novelis a distinctly less satisfying experience than The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists. This book is arranged thematically, on subjects such as regionalism, feminism, and satire, with most essays dominated by plot summaries of often minor novels. There are good essays on history and postmodernism, but many are workmanlike and weighed down with the kind of heavy jargon that only an earnest undergraduate (or valiant reviewer) would struggle through.

Both Companions are by necessity an assessment of the genre itself, its history and future. The rise of the novel depended upon the rise of the reader, and it is the future of the latter which is now in greater peril. There are still plenty of publishing phenomena, of the Twilight and Harry Potter variety, but these are elements of vast entertainment conglomerates, public consumption cults which stand in stark contrast to the long tradition of reading as solitary exploration.

Very few of us now consume novels with the kind of ranging appetite demonstrated by writer–readers such as Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Time does not permit. Other distractions are ever-present. Yet these two catalogues remind us of the novel’s enormous richness. They are invitations to re-enter this most human and humane of art forms and, to paraphrase Defoe, to listen to Everybody in Their Own Way.