Wendy Veronica Xin received her PhD from Berkeley and is a Departmental Lecturer in English at Hertford College, University of Oxford. She has completed her first monograph, The Secret Lives of Plot, and is working on two book projects, the first of which is on character, titled On Being (and Not Being) a Person: The Function of Literary Character, and the second of which is about how problems of genre can teach us about social life. Her articles and reviews have appeared in New Literary History, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and others.