In May 2017, the annual City University of New York (CUNY) Victorian Conference addressed the history of Victorian feminist criticism. Our conference coincided with the fortieth anniversary of A Literature of Their Own and the thirtieth anniversary of Desire and Domestic Fiction, affording us a chance to think about the legacy of these groundbreaking texts. Elaine Showalter, Martha Vicinus, and Nancy Armstrong spoke about their struggles to establish and maintain Victorian feminist work in the twentieth century, often against outright hostility. We also heard about issues in twenty-first-century Victorian feminist practice: Alison Booth spoke about digital-humanities codification of Victorian women's lives, Jill Ehnenn discussed queer revisions, and Maia McAleavey explored new theories of relationality, while I gave a response to Armstrong's talk. Meanwhile, Carolyn Oulton's discussion of the ongoing struggle to canonize Victorian women writers spoke to the continuous work required to make Victorian women's writing familiar to the field. It was an emotional day, for we all recognized that this might be one of the last times that the founding generation could be together to share these stories.

It would be hard to discover a theoretical or aesthetic approach to George Eliot's Middlemarch that is not already anticipated in some way by the novel's sagacious narrator. Possibly that persona, the quintessential Victorian polymath, does not foresee digital humanities as we know it. But critics have been struck as much by Eliot's prototyping of information systems, semiotics, and network analysis as by her humanist ethics. Casaubon does not invent the database of myths any more than Lydgate discovers DNA, or than Marian Evans Lewes rivals Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. As I illustrate a kind of digital research that adjusts to the minute particulars of narrative, I hope to keep sight of historical distances between the 1830s, the 1870s, and the era of feminist Victorian studies that I sketch here. Lydgate's penetrative “invention,” in the epigraph, is associated elsewhere in the novel with his actual “flesh-and-blood” vitality: “He cared not only for ‘cases,’ but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth” (Middlemarch, chap. 15). He is as dedicated to evidence as the narrator, in many scientific analogies, counsels readers to be, and yet he approaches his own life story and the characters of women with a kind of prejudgment that filters out most data. Eliot's readers, seeing Lydgate's errors, are flattered into believing we miss no signals and see all analogies. Can contemporary readers appreciate both numerical cases and individual stories of women? In this article I try to outline a feminist criticism that encompasses both typological classifications and flesh-and-blood individuality, both digital research and interpretative advocacy.

Although this essay is about reading texts from the past, I begin with the present, with a US president who was elected despite widespread knowledge that he had infamously boasted about how he often starts kissing beautiful women without consent. “I don't even wait,” he crowed. “When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” The internet was soon flooded with angry feminist responses to his crass admission of sexual violence, retorts that appropriated his use of vulgar language with wit and resistance, the most prevalent being the meme “Pussy Grabs Back!” (see fig. 1). The Pussy Hat Project soon followed. As we know, the pussy hat phenomenon offended some who felt it was racist (not all vulvas are pink) and/or transphobic (not all women have pussies). Nevertheless, a sea of pink pussy hats, worn by persons of many embodiments and identity categories, would be seen in protest, worldwide, at the record-breaking post-inauguration Women's Marches across the globe. If “Grab ’em by the pussy” rightly offended, “Pussy Grabs Back!” gained traction.

It is fitting that this article emerged from a conference in which the orderly progression of speakers was continually modified by exchanges within the conference space, for these two ways of organizing information form the subject of this article. When we aim to recover Victorian women writers, we often imagine a particular case in a timeline, selecting and extracting in a tacit model of linear orderliness. This is particularly significant in what we might call “recovery feminism,” the practice of salvaging texts that have been lost to history. Recovery feminism has dominated Victorianist feminist criticism since its development in the late 1970s, and I practiced it enthusiastically in my first book, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes. In this article, I want to acknowledge what recovery feminism has given us, but I also want to delineate the profound and often unarticulated ways it continues to structure our work, often with unintended consequences. In order to explore alternative forms of feminism, I assess theories of influence and intertextuality, and I use Charlotte M. Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) as an example that both thematizes this issue and acts as a case study of forms of feminist criticism. A viable feminist criticism, I contend, ought to be able to address a novel like Heir, and Heir itself may be able to provide a model for how to do that. Such a model of feminist practice might actually resemble the simultaneous, atemporal, interactive model of the conference day. In the digital era, we occupy an alternative chronology, in which we envision ourselves not as strenuously excavating the last disintegrating relics of the past, but rather as choosing among multiple simultaneous virtual texts, severed from markers of time or space. What might be a feminist critical practice for the way we work now?

Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.

“If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election …” Wouldn't it be nice to climb down into that imaginative rabbit hole and stay there for a while? The possibilities are so reassuringly normal—as opposed to the strange nightmare in which we find ourselves today. For the purposes of this roundtable, however, I wish to consider only one small potential consequence of a Hillary win: and that is what it would have been like to read Catherine Gallagher's new book if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. I would probably have experienced Telling It Like It Wasn't as a fascinating intellectual history of a mode or a discourse that has enormous political purchase today, largely as a result of its “affiliation with legal and political historical justice projects.” Although thinkers of all political persuasions use this mode, Gallagher explains, the political counterfactual has played a particularly prominent role in “the pressure exerted by the civil rights movement in favor of a Second Reconstruction, affirmative action programs, and claims for reparations” (124–25). It has served as a way to right the wrongs of history, in other words, and as such has served us extremely well. Or, at least, that is how I would have felt if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. But she did not. As a result, rather than simple intellectual pleasure and political hopefulness, reading Telling It Like It Wasn't filled me with a strong sense of dread.

In thinking about Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't, let us first consider three almost random, and definitely unrelated, examples:

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

One salutary effect of encountering the often bizarre materials—Leibniz's possible worlds theory, war-games played in Prussian military academies, books about the presidency of Jefferson Davis—that Catherine Gallagher has assembled in Telling It Like It Wasn't is that one obtains a better purchase on the deep weirdness that also informs normal realist novels. That weirdness is central to the realist tradition's historical fictions especially, by virtue of the peculiar manner in which they compound together fictional invention and referentiality and call on readers to traverse the ontological chasms between the two.

The occasion for this collection of responses to Telling It Like It Wasn't is a conference titled “Novel Theory.” Given this conjuncture, it seems only obvious to pose the question: What does a counterfactual theory of the novel look like? Of course, there is no single theory of the novel, but there is a book and a thinker most closely associated with the phrase, “theory of the novel,” and that is Georg Lukács. And while Theory of the Novel is the obvious text to revisit to counterfactually historicize and/or theorize, it seems more worthwhile for the history of Europe's counterfactual historical imagination to turn to Lukács's other great text, one that features somewhat prominently in Gallagher's book—namely, The Historical Novel.

I want to begin my remarks by steaming, as a philatelist would a coveted stamp, a single word off the envelope of Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't. The word occurs in the introduction, where Gallagher is establishing the boundaries of her subject by offering a sample counterfactual-historical premise: “If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963 and had lived to be a two-term president, the war in Vietnam would have been over by 1968.” The Kennedy premise, Gallagher goes on to say, “is not attempting to call the assassination into question or to imply that we should look into it more deeply; it is simply asserting that but for the assassination, history would likely have taken a different path. Insisting on this definition of ‘historical counterfactual’ at the outset should not only clarify the topic but also emphasize that the works under discussion are hinged onto the actual historical record, usually at a juncture that is widely recognized to have been both crucial and underdetermined.”

I felt both tremendously honored and slightly alarmed when I learned that this roundtable was being organized. I was delighted that such a stellar group of novel critics was willing to read Telling It Like It Wasn't but worried about their reactions to what Deidre Lynch has called the book's “deeply weird materials.” Much of the historical substance, especially the military and economic historiography, are far from our usual interests, and many of the literary texts are obscure and ephemeral. Furthermore, I passed over the opportunity to write about the best-known novels (like Philip Roth's Plot Against America) by limiting my twentieth-century case studies to American Civil War and British World War II counterfactuals. So I worried that a panel on this eccentric book might seem merely an irrelevant interruption, especially in the context of a meeting of the Society for Novel Studies.

Although my critical focus has shifted in recent years onto other areas—both earlier and later—of novel studies, I find myself returning to the novels of the 1840s, which is, in my view, the pivotal moment in the history and theory of the British novel. This is the moment when novels relegated forever to the past a future that ensured domestic contentment. During the period from 1847 to 1900, as Georg Lukács tells the story, the historical novel faltered and then froze in its tracks, as the narrative of an individual caught in the winds of historical change capitulated to descriptions of demonically fetishized objects that obscured the engines of change. What Lukács doesn't mention is that, halfway through that same period, novels abruptly ceased to formulate a country house providing what Hannah Arendt has called “a model of national housekeeping.” From the ashes of that bourgeois appropriation of certain aspects of the genteel way of life, the novels of the 1840s assembled a single-family household as a kinship system uniquely capable of operating at every level of English society. To go by these novels, one would think that belonging to such a household was not only the same as belonging to English society itself but was also necessary to one's biological survival. In returning to that moment, I want to consider, more pointedly, what these two observations concerning the form of the Victorian novel have to do with one another, a question that was very much in the air in 1977, when I received my doctorate and took up my first university post.

In Middlemarch, when Mr. Brooke asks Edward Casaubon how he arranges his documents, the pedantic would-be author of “The Key to All Mythologies” replies with a “startled air of effort” that he puts them into “pigeon-holes mostly.” Dorothea's uncle is baffled. He complains that his own scattered gatherings became much too “mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is in A or Z.” Embarrassed, his niece volunteers to sort out his papers: “I would letter them all, and then make a list of subjects under each letter.” Her offer catches Mr. Casaubon's attention. Commending Mr. Brooke for having such “an excellent secretary at hand,” he gravely smiles his approval. But the befuddled gentleman whose mind remains full of disconnected “fragments” bluntly rejects Dorothea's offer: “‘No, no,’ said Mr. Brooke: ‘I cannot let young ladies meddle with my documents. Young ladies are too flighty.’”

I have never forgotten a comment made by a friend at the first feminist meeting, held in Bloomington Indiana, in the spring of 1969: “Nothing travels faster than an idea whose time has come.” We were amazed and thrilled to discover how much we had in common with other women, and how the women's movement in its early stages gave us permission to express in public a variety of extreme emotions. All of us at that meeting were young, untenured faculty and graduate students, and suddenly—or at least so it seemed—we could speak out against authority. And sometimes authority listened. We quickly turned to writing, our natural medium, for we realized that our academic work had an immediate resonance with our political ambitions. How rare and special this moment was for those of us who worked on the literature of dead authors!

In his evocatively named “Attacks on Linking,” originally published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1959, W. R. Bion describes patients who produce symptoms—hallucinations, stutters, sleepiness—designed, unconsciously, to destroy closeness with the analyst. In a numbered list of “clinical examples,” Bion describes incidents from his own practice: one patient sees a blue haze filling the room. Another reports two probability clouds floating in the air. A third tries to agree with what Bion has said, but stammers so markedly that he cannot get the words out. A fourth hallucinates that a piece of iron falls to the floor. The haze, the clouds, the stuttering, the “dead piece of iron,” initially inexplicable, become in Bion's hands “attacks on linking”: ways not to see, not to speak, not to connect, not to think.

My title is paradoxical, possibly wrong. Refamiliarizing means reintroducing the once known but since forgotten on the assumption that familiarity fosters understanding. The logic on view inheres in the root word, “familiar”: “known to a person from long or close association.” But Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984), enfant terrible of the Russian Formalists from the second decade of the twentieth century right to the end of his long life (another paradox), contests that logic. Defamiliarization, his most significant contribution to literary theory, posits that more familiarity with flogging, sex, or the custom of burying the dead—his examples, to which I will return—results in less rather than more of a sense of what they are. In a consequential opposition, Shklovsky claims we lose the ability to see what we encounter frequently; we come instead merely to recognize it by its outlines, “as though it were enveloped in a sack.” To see it again, to see it in all its particularity, requires the disorientation that arises when the familiar appears before us as precisely, if temporarily, unrecognizable. Since I aim to render strange, to remove the sack, this little essay should of course be called “Defamiliarizing Viktor Shklovsky.”

Vanity Fair (1848) famously opens with a departure. As Becky Sharpe flounces off from Miss Pinkerton's academy, she takes leave of her patron by telling her “in a very unconcerned manner … and with a perfect accent, ‘Mademoiselle, je viens vous faire mes adieux.’” Miss Pinkerton, we learn, “did not understand French, she only directed those who did: but biting her lips and throwing up her venerable and Roman-nosed head … said, ‘Miss Sharp, I wish you a good morning’” (7). This performance of befuddlement on the part of a respectable schoolmistress bespeaks a whole collection of Victorian cultural norms about language competence in general and about the French language in particular. Even though the action is set in a period when Becky's speaking “French with purity and a Parisian accent … [was] rather a rare accomplishment” (11), the novel was written for a mid-nineteenth-century audience that could mainly count on middle-class young ladies to have acquired this degree of refinement—or at least to aspire to do so.

As Mrs. Herriton contemplates the fate and future of her wayward daughter-in-law, Lilia's baby born to the Italian Gino Carella in E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, she surmises reluctantly, “Let us admit frankly … that after all we may have responsibilities.” Without limiting ourselves to Forster's responses to and articulations of these “responsibilities,” the notion nonetheless of having such responsibilities usefully encapsulates some of the central issues at the heart of political criticism both in Forster's time and in our own. Who is the “we” with responsibilities and for whom or what is that “we” responsible? What exactly are these responsibilities? How local or global are they? How do they bring together the ethical and the political, the moral and the legal, duty and obligation, redress and hope for the future? How do the past, present, and future come together within this matrix of responsibilities? What kinds of political stances, posturings, or attitudes are in play? And what is the desired outcome or aim of political criticism? “We may have responsibilities”: in Forster, an equivocal or subjunctive “may” coupled with a frank admission and an expansive claim to amorphous “responsibilities” not only captures how open-ended and contradictory such assertions can be but also how tenuous their very ground always is. After all, Mrs. Herriton's sense of responsibility is highly disingenuous, the baby a pawn in her own power games.