This carelessness, a lack of empathy, appears in Jane Austen’s negative characters: in Lady Catherine, in Mrs. Norris, in Mr. Collins or the Crawfords. The theme recurs in Henry James’s stories and in Nabokov’s monster heroes: Humbert, Kinbote, Van and Ada Veen. Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can’t experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these
