ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way in which four nineteenth-century novelists - two female and two male - approached the problem of the body in fiction. Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy each developed a variety of strategies for the representation of the body within the very diverse economies of their narratives. The novelist and the painter, however, are to be distinguished in one very important respect. Pictorial art can be non-figurative; the still-life and the landscape form important traditions in the history of painting. The verbal portraits in Bleak House are numerous and they punctuate the novel at regular intervals. Like their visual equivalents they are framed, not spatially, but textually as the narrative pauses and the mental eye dwells momentarily on the physical appearance of character undistracted by the forward movement of the story.
