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
Unreliable narrator in her 1967 novel "Endless Night". The same technique was employed (baldly) in William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847–8 serial and novel "Vanity Fair"—one of the few examples of an unreliable authorial narrator in the English novel—where he admits passing over the worst of Becky's misdeeds in silence while providing enough allusions and clues (including in the content and captions of the illustrations, also done by Thackeray) to show the way to those interested in them; even their accuracy, however, is made dubious by his admission that he learned the story second-hand from the diplomat Tapeworm. The Norwegian crime writer Sven Elvestad's