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This chapter examines Pyotr Ilyich's opera Eugene Onegin, which is based on Alexander Pushkin's novel. It suggests that though there were criticisms on the opera's occasional mishandling of Pushkin's text, its musical narrative struck a profound resonance with a public brought up on psychological novels and socially charged literary criticism. The chapter also highlights the importance of the emotional landscape created by the opera's music in sealing the fate of Eugene Onegin.

This chapter examines how Karl Philipp Moritz invoked the psychological productivity of novelistic storytelling in publishing the “psychological novel” Anton Reiser (1785–1790) as part of his project of empirical psychology or Erfahrungsseelenkunde. This use of fictional narrative for the representation of dispassionate observation, and the choice of engaging a literary genre for the production of psychological knowledge assigned irreducible cognitive qualities to literature. Anton Reiser is not only another case of Moritz's extensive psychological project but also a paradigmatic case for the importance of literary form in the observation and recording of psychic phenomena. The institutional framework of the novel is not just the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, but literary discourse as an epistemological rather than aesthetic enterprise. Ultimately, Anton Reiser is a literary exercise in establishing a perspective from which self-observation becomes possible.

This introduction calls attention to situational and relational understandings of character that modernist writers developed in order to free their representations of people from the moralistic ideals of consistency. It emphasizes the central part played by the vitalist psychologies of Bergson, William James, and Nietzsche, and the scientific theories of Darwin, in literary efforts to reimagine character. Vitalism was interested in conceptualizing the emergence of change within living processes. It made available a sophisticated conceptual language for grappling with the open-ended, adaptable, and responsive elements of psychic life. The chapter treats ethics as concerned with what is good or bad for life. It suggests that this was a topic of special concern to James, Stein, and Eliot, who thus form a vitalist literary genealogy. To understand previous literary treatments of character, it contrasts their approaches to those of important nineteenth-century precursors, George Eliot, Herman Melville, and Joseph Conrad.

This chapter examines The Tale of Genji or the Genji monogatari, written in the early eleventh century by a woman named Murasaki Shikibu. The title The Tale of Genji comes from the surname of the hero, who is the son of the emperor regnant at the beginning of the narrative and whose life, marriage, and relationships with various women are described over the course of the first forty-one chapters. The remaining thirteen chapters are primarily concerned with the affairs of Kaoru, Genji's putative son. Shikibu's creation of highly individualized characters in a realistic social setting and her subtle presentation of inner thought and emotion have encouraged critics to call the Genji the world's first psychological novel.

Woolf appears in consummate command in her 1924 diary. She curbs her number of diary entries and brakes her previous need for praise. London supplies the motion she craves. As she finishes Mrs. Dalloway and her Common Reader essays, she sends out shoots of other works. The diaries she reads assist her. The Letters and Journals of Anne Chalmers, which Woolf reviews in February 1924, were edited by Chalmers’ daughter. They recall and preserve a dead mother, describe summer holidays at the Scottish seaside with “a large and clever family,” and even offer the name Mrs. Ramsay. Woolf then reads The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West, another case of a daughter thinking back through, and immortalizing, a dead foremother. Lady Clifford's Renaissance diary also offers women’s history and grist for Woolf’s essays “The Elizabethan Lumber Room” and “Donne after Three Centuries.” Even more important, its tale of a ferocious fight over a daughter’s inheritance inspires the plot of Orlando. In July, Woolf reviews the early journals of Stendhal, the father of the psychological novel. They direct her mind (yet again) to the soul and to the many nuances and contradictions of character.

Dwelling on the strange redundancies and formal excesses of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, this chapter traces in the novel’s paradoxically exorbitant consolidation of interiority the inception of the psychological novel. In the novel’s allegory, Crusoe is removed (by two shipwrecks) to his solitary island, where the social can be reconstituted and produced as a drama of one. The chapter explores several instances of the expropriating, anticipatory, self-grounding structure of character formation in the novel: the dream anticipating the appearance of Friday, whose language lessons are anticipated, in turn, by the speech of the parrot. Briefly considering J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, the chapter then turns to Jean-Claude Milner’s essay “Être-Seul,” which traces a paradoxical relation between the speaking subject and the social world of speech, one that rhymes with Defoe’s allegory of inception. The solitude of the speaking being, Milner suggests, is the ground of his speaking. Marooned by the very faculty of speech that would ostensibly allow us to address another or others, this solitude, however, portends a paradoxical form of community. We have it, paradoxically, in common, that we are each of us alone; Milner’s account of the solitude of speech thus illuminates the layered account of inception in Defoe.