This study investigates human curiosity and its depiction in eavesdropping scenes in nineteenth-century English and French novels. Ann Gaylin sheds light on the social and psychological effects of the nineteenth-century rise of information technology and accelerated flow of information, as manifested in the anxieties about (and delight in) displays of private life and its secrets. She analyzes eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Collins, and Proust. This innovative study is of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.

Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust investigates human curiosity and its representation in eavesdropping scenes in nineteenth-century English and French novels. Ann Gaylin argues that eavesdropping dramatizes a primal human urge to know and offers a paradigm of narrative transmission and reception of information among characters, narrators and readers. Gaylin sheds light on the social and psychological effects of the nineteenth-century rise of information technology and accelerated flow of information, as manifested in the anxieties about - and delight in - displays of private life and its secrets. Analysing eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Collins, Dickens and Proust, Gaylin demonstrates the flexibility of the scene to produce narrative complication or resolution; to foreground questions of gender and narrative agency; to place the debates of privacy and publicity within the literal and metaphoric spaces of the nineteenth-century novel. This 2003 study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.