Review: Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction, by Talia Schaffer

The best critical books afford readers new perspectives not only on familiar nineteenth-century texts, but also on something yet more familiar and perhaps therefore even more in need of a fresh view: their own lives as readers, critics, teachers, colleagues, partners, friends, and parents. Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction is such a book. Talia Schaffer’s description and theorization of a world that is profoundly, imperfectly interrelational, one in which we are immersed in networks where our varied roles shift and change around the fulcrum of care, is both deeply Victorian and urgently contemporary. Readers will find in it a paradigm for thinking about the history of the novel and its representation of individual subjectivity and complex social groupings, and they will find in Schaffer a writer dedicated to thinking communally about how to use the tools we have honed as scholars to build better communities and...