Thinking in Time

I T is an extraordinary pleasure to be read so carefully by people whose work has shaped your own.The people I read are always the imaginary audience in my head-so to have some of them as a real audience is amazing.And they have made me see my own work in a new way, particularly the things about it that are odd, things I've lived with for so long that I don't really notice them.One of the odd things about this book is that it has three big arguments.It has those arguments because that's where the questions led me, from the moment in the late 1990s when I began it.At that moment I was fascinated by the way Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (1871-73) was so profoundly illuminated by theories linking the circulation of women, goods, and words, theories that came out of structuralism and poststructuralism, Claude Lvi-Strauss, French feminism, and Gayle Rubin, among others.Did that fit, I wondered, mean anything other than that these theories were "true"?And why was it that the theories and the metaphorical language of the novel made Lizzie a seller of herself, when Trollope had gone through all the trouble to make her a widow with money who was, actually, buying a husband?You could see this as further evidence that the theories were true-that Victorians imagined women as economic objects, rather than economic agents, even if they did have money.Or you could ask, as I always like to do: Is there another way to see this?Those questions led me to the Victorian anthropologists, Trollope's relation to them, and their relation to the twentieth-century theorists of sexuality through whom we read Victorian novels.And they led me to suspect that if there was a fit between our theory and Victorian novels, perhaps that might be not because our theories were true but because they were Victorian, because Victorian ideas, from Victorian novelists and theorists, produced much of the theory we used to read those ideas.At the time, I thought the primary usefulness of knowing this would be to get us to reexamine our own