The evidence of Victorian and modern readers proves that this kind of commentary, which until quite recently was thought to exemplify non-novelistic" and inartistic elements, provides an important art of the pleasure of reading a novel and cannot therefore be considered necessarily extraneous to it. Wayne Booth correctly argues in The Rhetoric of Fiction that if our criterion for allowing authorial commentary is "appropriateness to the whole work, we are forced to ask ourselves what the 'whole work' is when dozens of ages have already been devoted to commentary. We do not experience these 'intrusions' as independent outbursts; they are continuing steps in our acquaintance with the narrator."

Acquaintance with the narrators of Victorian novels provides a major source of these books' pleasure. Unfortunately for critical understanding of this kind of fictional effect, the emphasis upon indirection and avoiding authorial commentary made by Percy Lubbock's influential The Craft of Fiction (1921), which dominated criticism of the novel in England and America for four decades, imply led critics to deny the critical validity of narrative comment and refuse to take seriously the remarks of those who claimed to receive pleasure from it. Not surprisingly, this reductive Jamesian approach to the novel assumes that readers who enjoy authorial commentary are naive and critically uninformed. contrast, Booth, who argues that authorial commentary is inevitable, accepts the testimony of readers. In particular, he cites as e kind of evidence a critical theory of fiction must take into account remarks by readers that they enjoy the narrators of Eliot, Dickens, Forster. Booth specifically raises this subject because it contributes to our understanding of the role played in fiction by e implied author's commentary; the fictive personality of this implied author is created, we recall, by commentary. Booth's clear-headed approach also permits us to observe how Victorian fiction employs ethos.