Ideas and the Novel: Dostoevsky’s ‘The Possessed’
Mary McCarthy, 17 April 1980
“... men have seen it by.’ But it is all a mistake, as with Emma’s obstinate plans for Harriet in Jane Austen’s novel. Mr Casaubon is no Pascal; his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, to which Dorothea plans to devote her young energies, is a figment of his fussy, elderly brain, an ‘idea’ he once had for a multi-volume work which is simply gathering dust in ... ”