Those of us who care about reading, and reading fiction in particular, are worried. Studies confirm what we see with our own eyes: people are reading fewer novels. To take just one example: According to the National Endowment for the Arts, in 2022, only 37.6 percent of adults reported reading a novel or short story the preceding year. That was, the NEA reports, “the lowest share on record.”
It’s not difficult to see why. More than ever, social media, streaming services, and the internet offer easier entertainment, drawing our attention away from more demanding alternatives. The ever-expanding presence of Artificial Intelligence raises other concerns. Will students resort to asking AI for plot summaries and character descriptions instead of immersing themselves in challenging novels? If they take these shortcuts in school, will they ever learn to enjoy the complex pleasures of a great work of fiction? Unfortunately, institutional leaders seem too willing to lower their expectations. According to the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, the College Board has truncated the SAT’s “reading passages from 500-700 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social media post.”
These are worrying developments because reading fiction can not only delight and entertain us, but can also deepen our understanding of humanity. Leon Kass, Amy Kass, and Diane Schaub rightly declare that “to hear—or read—and discuss the best stories told by the best storytellers is more than a way of passing time. It is a way of deepening time, by taking us to the profoundly humanizing truths contained in the ordinary surfaces of our experience.” And Jane Austen was onto something when she observed that great novels are works “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.”
Simply put, great fiction offers beauty, wisdom, and truth—the hallmarks of a classical education. Because it can convey these things in a unique way unavailable to other arts and areas of study, the growing number of classical schools around the country could be an important force in encouraging rising generations to embrace fiction. That means not only assigning exceptional novels, but also guiding students to understand the wisdom of the works. Because, as even Austen knew, there can be a downside to fiction, too.
When Austen wrote the previously quoted apologia for her craft, the most common argument against fiction was not that it was too difficult or inaccessible, as seems to be the main charge today, but that it was too easy or frivolous. In fact, the novel in which she mounts her defense, Northanger Abbey, is a satire of how the mind of an immature or naïve reader can be deformed by books. Because that novel’s heroine, Catherine Morland, is an avid but naïve reader of gothic fiction, she jumps to absurd conclusion after absurd conclusion about non-existent dangers around her. Her inability to separate fact from fiction (like Don Quixote’s) is the novel’s constant source of both humor and conflict. Yet when Catherine assumes that her romantic interest, Henry Tilney, doesn’t read novels because “they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books,” he corrects her and explains, “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” Preach! But just because intelligent people like Tilney recognize the power of great fiction doesn’t mean gullible minds like Catherine can’t be warped by it.
Austen’s attitude toward fiction is similarly complex in Pride and Prejudice. One of the sillier and more pompous characters in that novel is William Collins, a clergyman but, the narrator warns us, “not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society.” One of the many occasions on which Collins makes a fool of himself is when he visits the Bennet family and is asked to read aloud to them. Someone hands him a book, “but on beholding it . . . he started back, and, begging pardon, protested that he never read novels.” His prudish overreaction to the idea of reading a novel—I imagine a vampire’s reaction upon seeing a crucifix—confirms his all-around pretentiousness. Yet once again, Austen also hints at the dangers of fiction on naïve minds, albeit more subtly than she does in Northanger Abbey. She does so by showing how the two youngest Bennet sisters react to Collins’s anti-fiction stance: “Kitty stared at him, and Lydia exclaimed.” This detail is notable because Kitty and Lydia are the two daughters whose bad decisions cause the most trouble in the novel. That they seem especially drawn to fiction is a subtle reminder that although Collins is wrong to reject novels out-of-hand, they may nonetheless have pernicious effects on certain readers.
Austen’s contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, made similar points about fiction’s virtues and dangers in his first novel, Waverley. That work’s title character is a young man who has spent too much time carelessly reading chivalric romances—not quite the modern novel as we know it, but one of its predecessors. Just as Catherine Morland sees herself as a heroine in a gothic novel, Edward Waverley sees himself as a hero in a romance. That unrestrained imagination makes him vulnerable to the machinations of rebels who exploit his naïveté for their own, treasonous ends. Waverley suffers this fate in part because the people in charge of his education—his father, his aunt and uncle, and his tutor—allow him to read whatever he wants without proper guidance, believing in what Scott’s narrator calls “the vulgar doctrine, that idleness is incompatible with reading of any kind, that the mere tracing the alphabetical characters with the eye is in itself a useful and meritorious task, without scrupulously considering what ideas or doctrines they may happen to convey.”
Austen’s and Scott’s complex visions of fiction’s impact capture much of what makes the novel a potent and versatile art form. They recognize that impressionable minds can be misguided by what they read—but they can also be improved and elevated through encounters with beauty and wisdom (including wisdom about fiction’s dangers). As reading habits wane, it is more important than ever for great teachers to guide young readers and help them be shaped by the art “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed.”
Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read).
