"From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad " was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

David Daisches, Douglas Bush, Robert B. Heilman, Arthur Mizener, and William Van O'Connor are among the contributors to this volume of essays on the nineteenth-century British novel. Each of the selections has been written expressly for this book and is published here for the first time.

There are a total of 20 essays, each by a different contributor. In addition, Rathburn, in an introductory essay, relates the nineteenth-century novel to that of the eighteenth century and Steinmann, in the concluding essay, discusses the nineteenth-century novel in relation to that of the present century.

The contributors, in addition to the two editors of the volume, and the novelists they discuss are the following: Charles Murrah, Jane Austen; Alan D Mckillop, Jane Austen; David Dasches, Walter Scott; Curtis Dahl, Edward Bulwer-Lytton; J. Y T. Greig, William Makepeace Thackeray; Douglas Bush, Charles Dickens; George H. Ford, Dickens; Melvin; R. Watson, the Brontes; Robert B. Heilman, Charlotte Bronte; Yvonne French, Elizabeth Gaskell; Bradford A. Booth, Anthony Trollope; Arthur Mizener, Anthony Trollope; Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot; Sumner J. Ferris, George Eliot; Wayne Burns, Charles Reade; Fabian Gudas, George Meredith; John Holloway, Thomas Hardy; Jacob Korg, George Gissing; William Van O'Connor, Samuel Burlter; W. Y. Tindall, Joseph Conrad. Although each essay is focused on a single novel or on one aspect of the novelist, all of them are written to give the reader sense of the novelist's whole achievement.