The Novelist in the Novel: Gender and Genius in Fictional Representations of Authorship, 1850-1949

Why do writers so often write about writers? This book offers the first comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the fictional novelist as a character in literature, arguing that our notions of literary genius are implicitly shaped by and explicitly questioned in novels about novelists, a genre that has been critically underexamined.

Elizabeth King guest lectures and tutors at the University of New South Wales, where she has taught for the last five years. Her work has appeared in Geniuses, Addicts and Scribbling Women: Portraits of the Writer in Popular Culture (2023), and she is the co- editor of Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative, Authority and Fictionality (2023) with Alison Gibbons. She currently works as an editor at Simon & Schuster Australia.