One of the witnesses in the trial of Phineas Finn, in Trollope's Phineas Redux, is a novelist, Mr. Bouncer. The surly Chaffanbrass does not cross-examine him on his evidence, but tests the prosecution case according to the canons of fiction! After conducting him through murders in Shakespeare, Scott and Bulwer, Chaffanbrass suggests to Bouncer, “ ‘You would not dare so to violate probability in a novel, as to produce a murderer … who should contrive a secret hidden murder, – contrive it and execute it, all within a quarter of an hour?’ ” This episode inverts the novel's usual fascination with the law by making the law attend to fiction. It represents the obverse of the demand for authentication addressed by Walter Hartright in The Woman in White. This fantasy is Trollope's last hurrah against the lawyers, and a jocular assertion of fiction's claim to rival the law as an authoritative interpreter of reality. The effect of adducing literary evidence in a legal trial in a novel is an unpretentiously comic, but nonetheless watertight, imbrication of novel and law.

While Trollope's claim to authoritative representation is based on writers being “ masters of human nature,” the novelists here studied have characteristically challenged the cultural forms through which human nature has been required to express itself. The cases of Effie Deans, Esther Summerson, Billy Budd and Doctor Aziz tell of the various fates awaiting those victimized by restrictive conceptions of the human and the natural.