Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis by Alicia Mireles Christoff. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2019,  269 pages.

At the end of The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud reminds his readers that dreams link past, present and future through the representation of desire. By this measure, Alicia Christoff's Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis (2019) is a dream of a book, linking the past (Victorian Novels), the present (British Object Relations), and the future (conceptions of interpretive possibilities). In a boldly imaginative and brilliantly realized display of interdisciplinary psychoanalytic criticism, Novel Relations interweaves close reading of Victorian Novels by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot with masterful summaries and uses of major British Object Relations theorists to show how the novels can be understood through the theories that they often anticipate and helped to create.

Although the recognition of Winnicott's importance for literary interpretation began some half century ago, Christoff expands the theoretical field to include Balint, Bion, Betty Joseph, Paula Heimann, Masud Kahn and more contemporary writers such as Thomas Ogden, Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas. She presents her book as “at its base a work of literary theory and criticism” (2019, p. 16) and amply displays her engagement in and mastery of the trends and debates within Victorian Studies, but her phenomenology of the reading experience also teaches us how post-Kleinian theories can be illuminated by close listening to the voices and stylistic music of the novels. With equal emphasis on both words in her title,