When we’re engrossed in a good novel we slip easily into other skins. The process is mysterious. We walk down streets we’ll never see, enjoy or suffer experiences we may never know, enter the cities of the past or of the future as though their keys had been given to us. The imagination holds in constant reserve its own fantastic theater, where all the actors and stage sets, the props and costumes, lie waiting for that magical prompt when the novelist’s vision lights up the mind’s proscenium. At the least we escape boredom for a few hours, but if we’re lucky, the novel becomes an event in our lives, forms part of our memory, and may even alter our view of things. The best novels offer us the possibility of transformation and for that reason alone are precious.

It’s a truism that great novels have something to tell us not only about life but about our own lives. But for decades literary criticism has neglected or scorned this useful truth in favor of “theory” and its barbarous jargon. How refreshing then to read a study which dwells without apology, and with genuine insight, on the ways in which novels impinge upon our own experience. This is Edward Mendelson’s “The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life” (Pantheon, 288 pages, $23). Mr. Mendelson is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University but is probably best known as W.H. Auden’s literary executor, editor, and biographer.

Mr. Mendelson has had the unfashionable idea of linking seven stages of human life with seven classic 19th- and 20th-century novels.The approach is subtler than it may sound. He shows not solely how these novels enlarge and illumine our own lives, but how our experience nuances and influences our reading of them. And though Mr. Mendelson is unflappably polite and even decorous in his discussions, his book is rather radical.

First, and perhaps most provocatively, all the novels he discusses are by women: one each by Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and three by Virginia Woolf. This is not due to any trendy agenda. Mr. Mendelson is passionately interested in those novels that “treat most deeply the great experiences of personal life.” As he explains it,

The reason that women writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were more likely than men to write about the emotional depths of personal life is that they were more likely to be treated impersonally, to be stereotyped as predictable members of a category, rather than recognized as unique human beings — and a woman writer therefore had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against the generalizing effect of stereotypes, and defend those values by paying close attention to them in her writing, by insisting that those values matter to everyone and that everyone experiences them uniquely.

I was a little dubious about this at first. What, no Thackeray, no Dickens, no Hardy, no Conrad? But Mr. Mendelson, whether because he is so perceptive and persuasive a reader or whether because he is in fact right, won me over from the outset. I don’t think I’ll read “Frankenstein” or “Wuthering Heights” or “Middlemarch” or “Mrs. Dalloway” in quite the same way again, thanks to his astute discussions. He has an admirable knack for pithy, almost aphoristic summations. For example, of “Frankenstein,” which he links to “birth,” he writes that it “is the story of childbirth as it would be if it had been invented by someone who wanted power more than love.” Or of “Wuthering Heights,” he notes aptly that “Childhood, in this novel, is a state of titanic intensity, adulthood a state of trivial weakness.” He is especially fine too in his tactful counterpoint of the drastically contrasting personalities of Emily and Charlotte Brontë (whom he links respectively with “childhood” and “growth”). In his hands each sister comes to seem more familiar yet remains unreachably mysterious.

A second unfashionable but refreshing aspect of his study is the way in which Mr. Mendelson draws on our common experience to elucidate his chosen novels. He is especially good on marriage. He notes, for example, that in “Middlemarch” marriage is “a condition in which one partner lives in ignorance of the other partner’s most intense thoughts and crucial acts, and knowledge always comes too late to be of use.” All married couples will have experienced this dislocating insight at one moment or another.

Mr. Mendelson writes lucidly; he eschews pretentious lit-gab but is too mannerly to polemicize. Still, he can’t resist a few sly jabs. In describing Emily Brontë’s sense of the cruelty in nature, he mentions the Marquis de Sade and comments,

De Sade is no more dangerous than a professor expounding transgressive ideas to a graduate seminar (which is one reason why de Sade has recently been in academic vogue); Emily Brontë is a more profoundly terrifying figure because she leaves behind the whole world of argument and discussion.

I wish Mr. Mendelson had devoted only one chapter to Virginia Woolf, genius though she was, and had offered us his insights into other novelists, such as Ivy Compton-Burnett or the late Penelope Fitzgerald. But this is a minor reservation. Mr. Mendelson is an impassioned reader and he communicates that passion.These writers may have, as Auden once put it in his sonnet “The Novelist,” “suffered dully all the wrongs of Man,” but there’s not a dull word in them.