'[C]onservatives Should Embrace the Novel'

Fifteen years ago, in a blog post titled “Conservative novels,”  my friend the late D.G. Myers critiqued a “top-ten” list of that literary species assembled by a writer at The National Review. David called the list “strangely disappointing,” and it’s tough to argue with that assessment. Allen Drury? Really? As David notes: “Only three novels on NR’s top-ten list really merit their inclusion, I think: Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Shelley’s Heart, and Gilead.”  

It's a matter of definitions, of course: what is meant by a “conservative novel”? And what is meant by “conservative”? There are no inarguably definitive definitions for such broad categories. David writes: “There are nearly as many definitions of conservatism as there are conservatives. The best, because the most comprehensive, belongs to Michael Oakeshott, who says conservatism is ‘not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition.’ It’s a habit of mind; it’s a natural inclination. It is a ‘propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else.’” David is quoting Oakeshott’s 1956 essay “On Being Conservative” (Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962).

 

Without mentioning David’s post, Christopher Scalia devotes an entire book to defining and defending such novels, limiting his choices to English and American books: 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read) (Regnery, 2025). By “conservative novel,” neither David nor Scalia means political tract or ideological manifesto. Their values are literary. Scalia, a former English professor and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, gets right to the point in his introduction:

 

“To read a great sentence written by any of the novelists in this book is to be awestruck by a combination of music and precision, imagination and wisdom. . . . [C]onservatives should embrace the novel because it is one of the great achievements of Western culture. It is the form through which many of the most talented creative minds of the past three centuries have expressed their ideas, explored their times and places, and both reflected and formed the minds and characters of their audiences. To understand the heights of our language and culture are capable of, we must be familiar with the heritage of the novel.”

 

Five of the thirteen novels on Scalia’s list I have not read: Evelina (1778), Frances Burney; Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston; The Children of Men (1992), P.D. James; Peace Like a River (2001), Leif Enger; The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (2020), Christopher Beha. The last three I had never heard of. Here are the remaining eight novels:

 

Rasselas (1759), Samuel Johnson; Waverley (1814), Walter Scott; The Blithedale Romance (1852), Nathaniel Hawthorne; Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot; My Ántonia (1918), Willa Cather; Scoop (1938), Evelyn Waugh; The Girls of Slender Means (1963), Muriel Spark; A Bend in the River (1979), V.S. Naipaul.

 

The Scott novel I haven’t read since I was a kid, and I remember little about it, though I do remember Guy Davenport urging me to read all of Scott. Hawthorne I have never been able to stomach. A cloak of dullness surrounds his work for me. The rest are excellent choices. I’ve read all of them at least twice. Scalia’s bravest, most inspired choice is Daniel Deronda, in which the title character becomes a Zionist more than twenty years before the first Zionist Congress of 1897. Among its other virtues, Eliot’s novel is timely. I place it high among all the English novels of the nineteenth century, that golden age of fiction. In the final paragraph of her study The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (Encounter Books, 2009), the late Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:

 

“Daniel Deronda is an enduring presence in the ​‘Great Tradition’ of the novel--and an enduring contribution as well to the age-old Jewish question. Many novels of ideas die as the ideas themselves wither away, becoming the transient fancies of earlier times and lesser minds. Eliot’s vision of Judaism is as compelling today as it was more than a century ago, very much part of the perennial dialogue about Jewish identity and the Jewish question.”

 

In the 2010 post noted above, David Myers describes Eliot, in passing, as “an unremarked conservative novelist in her own right.” As with any list, one longs for the missing and is baffled by some of the inclusions. Scalia attaches an appendix titled “If You Liked . . . Try . . .” at the conclusion of his book, suggesting other, similar titles. This assuages somewhat my surprise and confusion at the absence of certain books and writers. The first name: Joseph Conrad. Scalia suggests Under Western Eyes (1911). No argument, though I would have nominated Nostromo (1904) in the main list. The same goes for Henry James and The Princess Casamassima (1886). I’m delighted that Scalia includes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) among his also-rans. It’s on my short list for that mythical beast, the Great American Novel. The point of Scalia’s list is to encourage the reading of fiction among conservatives and others. In a sense, no title is wrong. Just get reading our inheritance.