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Moreover, when we think of this cultural-historical process of "matching" texts with their readers, perhaps it makes more sense to speak not just in terms of the text that serendipitously finds its audience but also in terms of the writer who finds hers. For it seems to me that working on a story that engages the reader's Theory of Mind in a particularly focused way must hit the author's own mind-reading spot as few other activities do. The process of writing can be excruciatingly difficult and is sometimes described in terms reminiscent of torture, but for a mind constituted the way the writer's mind is constituted, that process must represent something of a cognitive necessity. I am not saying that people who write fiction do it purely to stimulate or express their own peculiarly developed mind-reading ability. I do suspect, however, that other conscious and semiconscious incentives for writing, such as making a living, impressing potential mates, and advancing pet ideological agendas, would hardly suffice to make one offer up so much of her life to constructing elaborate mental worlds of people who never existed.

P. G. Wodehouse insisted that authors conjure up fictional worlds precisely for that kick of creating, controlling, and inhabiting other people's states of mind. He called it "liking to write," but the example that he used to illustrate that elusive "liking" shows that he thought that "what urges a writer to write" is the pleasurable opportunity for a particularly focused mind-reading:

I should imagine that even the man who compiles a railroad timetable is thinking much more of what fun it all is than of the check he is going to get when he turns in the completed script. Watch his eyes sparkle as he puts a very small (a) against the line

4:51 arr. 6:22 knowing that the reader will not notice it and turn to the bottom of the page, where it says

(a) On Saturdays only but will dash off with his suitcase and golf clubs all merry and bright, arriving in good time at the station on the afternoon of Friday. Money is the last thing such a writer has in mind. (110-11)

In response to Dr. Johnson's categorical "nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," Wodehouse would say that when the author has "written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money" (110). What drives the creative process is our hankering for mind-making and mind-reading. Some of us work it by compiling railroad timetables, others by writing scholarly books, still others by sailing the empyrean with the likes of Galahad Treepwood, Jeeves, and Ukridge.

Note how this view of writing fiction complicates an influential postulate of reader-response theory that "a text can only come to life when it

1: Authors Meet Their Readers

is read, and if it is to be examined, it must therefore be studied through the eyes of the reader."1 By now we are accustomed to thinking of a fictional narrative in terms of what it does to us (e.g., Booth is convinced that "it is good for [him] to be required to go through" The Wings of the Dove1) and what we do to it (e.g., we bring it to life; we "participate in the production of [its] meaning"3). Deeply congenial as these two views are to the perspective espoused by this study, we need to add the third component to them: the mind-reading mind of the writer. To poach on Booth's formulation, "[I]t is good" for the author to engage in the cognitive workout of constructing fictional minds. To poach on Iser's, a text "comes to life" in the mind of the author just as richly as—if not more richly than, in some aspects—it does in the mind of her readers because it engages her ToM in a unique and pleasurable (if at times torturous) manner.

The novel, then, is truly a meeting of the minds—of the particularly • inclined minds in a particular historical moment that has made the encounter serendipitously possible. Samuel Richardson could indulge