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 Virgins (novel) "A Sport and a Pastime"—a male narrator tells the story of a romance in which he doesn't take part. That narrator describes encounters and events he couldn't possibly have been a witness to. Suddenly I knew that was what I wanted to do with my own novel." In an article for her UK publisher, Erens identified five novels which "helped me feel that the task of writing about teens and sex was an achievable one": John Irving (like Erens a past student at Phillps Exeter) writing in "The New York Times" praises the characterization of the narrator: "He's a villain