Shortly after The Hotel New Hampshire was published, Irving said that his next novel would be a short one, set in New England during an apple harvest and modeled on Turgenev's "First Love" (circa 1860s; short story), a story of a father and son in love with the same woman. The 560-page The Cider House Rules only partly fits this description.

As is true of The Hotel New Hampshire, Irving's sixth novel does not have a precise literary precedent, but literary references and echoes abound. One of Wilbur Larch's rituals at the St. Cloud orphanage is to read to the children each night; the boys hear Great Expectations (1860) and David Copperfield (18491850), and the girls hear Jane Eyre (1847) — all novels about orphans — again and again, so that as they grow up, fragments of these novels are embedded in their imaginations. It is in part his...