Speaking Parts, by Tara Menon

Speaking Parts: Conversation, Character, and Social Worlds in Nineteenth-Century British Novels

by former Junior Fellow Tara Menon

In Speaking Parts, former Junior Fellow Tara Menon (2019-21, 2022-23) explores how direct speech—words enclosed in quotation marks that appear to be the exact utterances of characters—in the novel shapes our understanding of literary characters and their social worlds. Combining computational tools and close literary analysis, Menon quantifies direct speech in nearly one thousand British novels written between 1789 and 1901, before turning her attention to several canonical nineteenth-century works of fiction by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.

Published September 8, 2026, by Princeton University Press