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delightful episode in Pride and Prejudice in which Collins introduces himself to the Bennet household in a letter read by the family. This letter is, as Carroll nicely puts it, “an absolute marvel of fatuity and of pompous self-importance,” and much about characters of the family members is revealed in how mother, father, the Bennet sisters react to it. The excessively sweet-tempered oldest sister, Jane, is puzzled by it, though she credits Mr. Collins with good The dull middle sister, Mary, says vapidly that she rather likes Collins’s style. The mother, in her typical manner, only reacts opportunistically, in terms of a potential advantage in the situation. It is up to Elizabeth and her father to see clearly what a clownish per mance the letter represents: their joint understanding marks an affinity temperament and a quality of perceptiveness the others lack. But that there are two more people—not characters in a Jane Austen novel, but actual breathing human beings—who are in on the agreement between Mr. Bennet and his second daughter. These two further individuals are also members of what Carroll calls their “circle of wit judgment.” First, there is Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice. She was a real person, and a palpable sense of her lively, judicious animates every page of the writing. (Of course, academics have taken pride in stressing that this palpable sense too may be a clever of Jane Austen, but outside of the literary theorist’s seminar, stories with named authors are read as having been written by real people.) Second, there is you, the reader of Pride and Prejudice. The creation and the reader’s experience of it unite all of these sharpens and cultivates perspective. It is no small plea sure for the reader included in this exclusive circle.

If this makes literature sound like imaginary gossip, so be it. Much of what audiences have gotten from storytelling in pop u lar entertainment, naturally including soap operas and pop ular romance novels, is a vicarious extension of the plea sure of gossip: discovering people’s hidden motives, revealing life’s dirty laundry, and so forth. This fact need not regarded as reflecting poorly on either Jane Austen on one side or Harlequin romances on the other. Gossip is not always malicious time-wasting but can be a means of acquiring useful skills and information. It is pleasur able for many people because it had adaptive value ancestral environment, sharpening human perceptions and understanding. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, and George Eliot do make such natural plea sure to create great literature, extending it beyond what might be talked about over the back fence. In some respects Jane Austen too is giving us gossip—possibly the most elegant, insightful, witty gossip even committed to print. Carroll, with his high-art orientation, may object to Pinker’s account of fiction in terms of fantasy, and sheer entertainment plea sure, and indeed Carroll provides powerful arguments for seeing fiction in a different, more cultivated way, the older German tradition of Bildung, of the arts as crucial to create flourishing human personality. But he has not so much refuted Pinker shown that storytelling can do even more than Pinker acknowledges, and that this may well have had adaptive value.

Pinker’s regard for fiction is more plausibly applied to aspects of contemporary popular arts—including Marvel comics, splatter video games, most movies—than to Middlemarch. But there is no reason to deny that Harlequin readers and moviegoers today are also provided by their preferred fictions with cognitive maps and regulative templates. The general thesis about the deeper, long-term edification fiction can give not seriously challenged by new delivery mechanisms for storytelling. there was adaptive survival value in ancient, Stone Age storytelling, ought to extend to our own time and explain somehow the pleasure from any fictions—from effects-driven blockbuster movies, TV, cheap thrillers all the way to classic literature that presents, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “the best that is