Bleak House Bleak House Bleak House is a novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published as a serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and the story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of "Bleak House" is a long-running legal case, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce", which came about because someone wrote several conflicting wills. Dickens uses this case to satirise the English judicial system. Though the legal profession criticised Dickens' satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement, which
The Eye (novel) on Smurov — whom we only belatedly discover is the narrator himself. The result is a meditation on the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. The work is the first one in Nabokov's oeuvre involving a first-person narrator and, specifically, one who imposes his fantasy world upon the real world. This was to be a structure that was developed further in later works such as "Despair" (1934), "Pale Fire" (1962) and his final novel, "Look at the Harlequins!" (1974). In a 1967 interview with Alfred Appel Jr, Nabokov retrospectively suggested that the work might have represented a turning-point in his career