In Praise of the Minor Character: The Importance of Peripheral Figures in Victorian Literature

Minor characters are everywhere in novels. They linger with readers and invite us to infer into the untold aspects of their lives. They fill a text's landscape, bringing depth to its ecosystem, and encourage us to shift our thoughts from textual centers to margins and even to consider minorness in our own experiences. In their quietness, minor characters challenge us to hold oppositional perspectives, rethink interdependencies, and reimagine textual and lived relationships. In many ways, we identify with minor characters, and yet we lack a nuanced way of reading for them.

This work is about minor characters and the qualities of minorness in Victorian novels. It offers casual readers and scholars alike a method of reading and rereading for minor characters that extends across genres. Chapters trace and analyse minor characters across a range of novels including The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Vanity Fair, The Way We Live Now and more.

See more