Audrey Jaffe

Professor Jaffe's research and teaching focus on the Victorian novel. Her most recent book, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (2016), argues for the real as an object of desire in Victorian fiction. Scenes of Sympathy (2000) reconceived Victorian sympathy as an imagined exchange of social and class identities. She has also written about the relation between the stock market, Victorian finance, and the measurement of emotion (The Affective Life of the Average Man; 2010) and the idea of omniscience in Dickens (Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience; 1991). She is co-editor, with Elaine Hadley and Sarah Winter, of From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social (Palgrave, 2019), and is co-editing a volume about close reading and time with Mary Ann O’Farrell and Debra Gettelman.  Her current work involves the psychodynamics of genre; an essay on this topic appears in The George Eliot Handbook (2025).

Professor Jaffe regularly teaches courses on the genres and development of the Victorian novel, as well as a variety of courses and seminars on such topics as Victorian realism; deconstructing the Bildungsroman; affect and the novel; the novel and everyday life, and the novel as empathy machine.

Office Hours

Fall 2023  T 2:15-3:30 PM and by appt.

Publications

Books

Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter, eds., From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social (Palgrave, 2019).  

The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (Oxford UP, 2016)

The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (Ohio State, 2010)

Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Cornell, 2000)

Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (U. of California, 1991)

Recent Essays

“Scenes of Clerical Life”: The Genealogy of George Eliot’s Realism.” In Juliette Atkinson and Elisha Cohn, eds., The George Eliot Handbook (Oxford UP, 2025), 404-417.

“Recognizing Romola.” Novel 54:2 (2021), 227-247.

“Goffman Goes to Middlemarch.”  In Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke, eds., The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain (Routledge, 2020), 120-35.

“’When a House is So Much More:’  Character, Tenancy, and Property in Victorian Fiction.”   In Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter, eds., From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social (Palgrave, 2019), 153-72.

"Affect and the Victorian Novel." In Donald R. Wehrs and Thomas Blake, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Affect and Textual Criticism (Palgrave, 2017), 713-34.

"'Outside the Gates of Everything': Hardy's Exclusionary Realism," Novel 43:3 (2010)