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Th is is a book about books and not about literary history or critical debate. It is primarily for the general reader, the book club member and the student – for those who like to talk seriously about novels over tea (or coff ee) and cake, or something stronger if the sun is over the yardarm. Or as Miss Callendar puts it succinctly in Malcolm Bradbury’s Th e History Man (see chapter 16), ‘Do you mean am I structuralist or a Leavisite or a psycho-linguistician or a formalist or a Christian existentialist or a phenomenologist? … well, I’m none of them … I read books and talk to people about them.’1 Th e Business of Reading introduces twenty English novels of the past hundred years (that is, since the end of the First World War), some well known but most less so, as well as revisiting a nineteenth-century classic. It tries to avoid any distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ novels: critics have to make value judgments, but the categories are not mutually exclusive and arguably ‘popular’ novels oft en have more impact than their more ‘literary’ counterparts. Charles Dickens was, aft er all, very much a ‘popular’ novelist in his time however we regard him today. Th e critical pendulum has a disorientating habit of swinging from one extreme to another. Th e earliest English novelists oft en chose to stay in the background: for example, in Robinson Crusoe (1719) Daniel Defoe claimed only to be the editor of Crusoe’s own autobiographical story, Jonathan Swift ’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) was attributed to Lemuel Gulliver (in part because Swift was worried about the possibility of prosecution for his anti-Whig satire), and the fi rst edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was published anonymously. However, forty years later Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–81) shone a spotlight on the life and times of writers, which have been in and out of fashion as the main critical focus ever since. At the end of the nineteenth century, on an altogether diff erent tack, Anatole France suggested the personal view of the critic is in fact far more important than writers and even their works, declaring that ‘A good critic is one who narrates the adventures of his mind among masterpieces.’2 Early in the twentieth century, the exponents of practical criticism or close reading dismissed both these approaches and proposed rather sensibly that the text, and not the writer or the reader, should be the centre of critical attention, relegating such things as literary sources, biography of the author and historical context to the sidelines.3 In the United States, the ‘new critics’ took a similar but harder line, with W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley defi ning ‘Th e Intentional Fallacy’ and ‘Th e Aff ective Fallacy’.4 ‘Th e Intentional Fallacy’ argues it is not the critic’s job to worry about the author’s intention: once the novel, play or poem is launched into the world, it must fl oat or sink because of what it is and not because of what the author thought it should be. ‘Th e Aff ective Fallacy’ warns the reader against subjective critical judgements which colour the text with his or her own emotions. From Europe, in similar vein, came the concepts of structuralism, post- structuralism and deconstruction, critical theories rooted in the science and philosophy of language, and concentrating more on the linguistic structure of a text than on its meaning and value.