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‘Pride and Prejudice’ most popular novel in memory study
09/02/2021
Ahead of a special event at the Wolverhampton Literature Festival that will see writer Will Self talk about the intricacies of remembering fiction read in the past, University of Wolverhampton academics have identified the top five most popular novels for research into the ways we remember fiction.
The Novel Memories research was inspired by the BBC engagement project Novels That Shaped Our World, that is ran by BBC Arts and celebrates 300 years of the English language novel and aims to stimulate reading.
The most popular novels participants selected are: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee; ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ by George Orwell; ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ by C.S. Lewis; ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, and the most popular was Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’.
Professor Sebastian Groes and Dr Tom Mercer found this top five when analysing the responses to their Novel Memories survey in which people are asked about how they remember fiction in relation to the 40 most popular novels included on the Novels That Shaped Our World list.
Professor Groes said: “We first asked about factual memories of the fiction itself; if participants remembered scenes, characters, quotations and speeches, and if they had sympathy for the protagonist. We also asked if they had a clear memory of the ending, and interestingly, while over half of participants could remember how the story ended, 43 per cent could not.
“We then posed questions regarding contextual circumstances; what emotions the books trigger, and what mood they were in when they read the novel.”
For the top five novels, the researchers can tell which locations (home, school, university, commute, or holiday) are associated with them and they have some textual examples of people describing these locations and their memories.
They can also identify the best remembered scenes and quotations. The researchers are also interested to learn how people’s perspective changed when they revisit a novel they have read in the past.
Dr Mercer added: “It seems that memories of fiction overlap, to a large extent, with the ‘reminiscence bump’; a period of time between the ages of ten and 30 years when we have more personal memories as these formative years help us to develop a strong sense of self and it may also be the period where we encounter our favourite novels.
“A key conclusion is that we remember fiction by the feeling it leaves in us, not by detailed and rationally-remembered memories of specific passages, dialogue and even the ending.
“But, interestingly, this feeling is shaped by the emotions we experience in our lives at the time of the reading experience. Nearly half of the time we do not any remember specific scenes, though in two thirds of cases people have sympathy for the protagonist and over 40 per cent stated that they were in a happy mood when they read the novel in question.
“This confirms ‘emotional bias’. People attach strong positive emotions to these well-remembered novels, partly because of their emotional state at the time of the formation of the memories.”
They note that adaptations to screen seem to have an interesting effect. Pride and Prejudice was used as a case study and almost all participants had seen an adaptation, with half of them having no problem separating the novel from the adaptation.
However, a third of respondents either were unsure about their ability to separate the novel from the adaptation or felt the two had become ‘blurred’. The researchers could then look into which adaptations specifically are mentioned and cross-check this with the age of the participants.
Groes and Mercer have invited writer Will Self to discuss these findings. This free online event, Will Self's Novel Memories, can be booked via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/will-selfs-novel-memories-tickets-138158623161
Novel Memories is part of the ‘Novel Perceptions: towards an inclusive canon' research project that received £300,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) last year.
Thumbnail image courtesy of Folgert Karsdorp.
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