SPRING 2011 The Semi-Detached Provincial Novel John Plotz V ictorian readers possessed a vast arsenal of terms to describe what it felt like to get lost in a novel. Readers are engaged or enthralled; the novelist is a magician or a time traveler. The annihilation of present space and time often seems a blissful consum- mation. The highest praise a reviewer can give Dracula (1897) is to admit that “at ten we could not even pause to light our pipe” and by midnight “we listened anxiously for the sound of bats’ wings against the window” (Rev. 363–64), while Robert Louis Stevenson envies Fyodor Dostoyevsky beyond all writers because “it is not reading a book, it is having a brain fever to read [ Crime and Punishment]” (Stevenson 151). For many readers, then, a novel succeeded if it could engender absorption so complete that actions the work merely repre- sented could trigger “the ‘creepy’ effect, as of pounded ice dropped down the back” (qtd. in Sweet xvi). What of those novels, though, that present themselves neither as brain fevers nor as pounded ice? A wide range of Victorian novels implicitly or explicitly propose self-limiting claims about the sorts of power that an aesthetic experience has—or ought to have—over its readers. I am interested in the surprisingly wide range of moments in which reading is imagined as an incomplete rupture from ordinary life. In such works, the reader is imagined as getting lost in a book, but Abstract: English Victorian provincial novels can be distinguished from their Conti- nental peers by the important role that the idea of semi-detachment plays in novelists ranging from Gaskell and Trollope to Eliot and even Hardy. Semi-detached provincial novels explore the seemingly paradoxical process whereby local attachments can abet rather than thwart the experience of detached contemplation. The result—reflecting the importance of provincial experience as a template for an everyday Englishness crucial to emerging notions of national “culture”—is a striking formal congruence between the experience of semi-detachment understood to define a fully realized provincial life and the sort of semi-detached relationship the reader is meant to have to the text itself. Rather than a triumph of the local over the cosmopolitan, this is a fasci- nating version of magnum in parvo, whereby the provinces are desirable for their capacity to be at once a trivial nowhere and a conceptual everywhere.