On Introductions

Picture it: a cold, leisurely fall evening. Perhaps on the windowpane is the pitter-patter of rain drops, so you decide to stay in. It’s the perfect time to finallyy crack open that new novel. You’ve sunk into your comfortable lounge with a cup of herbal tea or perhaps a glass of something stronger to fight off the chill. Everything is cozy and quiet. There is nothing to interrupt you and the soft yellow light of the reading lamp is just right. You open that crisp new paperback, feeling the flexible, fresh spine bend under the weight of your hand and linger of the title page, luxuriating in the pleasurable effect of good typography. And now… And now…

An introduction. Has your reading ever ground to a halt at the sight of an introduction? When I was a child I would either become mired in the academic prose or guiltily flip past it. Every skipped intro felt—in part—like a debt I might have to pay one day, but to read the introduction was to risk becoming shipwrecked in the explanatory prose of some immanent scholar, until a college professor warned us away from introductions for the duration of her course and my guilt was finally expelled.

But an introduction can be a pleasure too. When I finally bought my very own copy of my favorite Jane Austen novel Northanger Abbey I had already read the library copy to tatters so when I accidentally began to read Robert Kiely’s introduction to The Modern library Classics edition I read voraciously about the parodic nature of Northanger Abbey, the genre parodied (romantic fiction and especially gothic fiction), and the moral panic that played out in England regarding the potential bad effects of reading fiction. Robert Kiely’s introduction did its job, to put in the way of an old fan of the novel some new and educational content to enrich my next reading of the work, and herein lies the answer to the question of when to read the introduction.

My professor’s request that her twenty-some-odd students not read the introductions to their victorian readings (and they all had introductions) was not a condemnation of the genre. She wanted her students to come up with their own interpretations, rather than coming to class with someone else’s (imagine the nightmare of twenty-something students all armed with the same perspective).

So, the answer is to not read the introduction prior to reading the novel itself. It isn’t meant for the new reader, in spite of its contradictory location, particularly because the interpretations contained within the introduction often include spoilers to the plot. Reading an introduction is best done after completing the novel, but it can be useful to do so after first reflecting on your own perspective. If you find yourself disinterested in lingering in the world of that novel and eager to move onto something else there is no obligation to read the introduction as it is supplementary. But if you wish there was more upon finishing that last paragraph, then reading the introduction can be a way to delve more deeply into the world of the novel, to better unstained its historical context and to read some new interpretations to see what some other enthusiast made of the work.

Are you an introduction reader? Tell me in the comments below.