The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

by Susan Wise Bauer

Reams have been written on this subject, but for our purposes it’s enough to know that this sense of an individual self with a private internal life was central to all the major developments of modern Western life: Enlightenment thought, the Protestant religion, the development of capitalism, and (of course) the novel. Novelists celebrated the individual: Charlotte Brontë’s tortured and passionate heroes; Jane Austen’s heroines, maneuvering through a society that both protects and hampers them; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tortured, adulterous clergyman. And the public bought, and read.