Victorian Unfinished Novels

The first detailed study on the subject of Victorian unfinished novels, this book explores the notion of incompleteness in major novelists such as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, W. M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, R. L. Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins and Henry James. The aim of this book is to shed further light on novels that have been neglected by critical studies (Thackeray's Denis Duval, Stevenson's St. Ives, Trollope's The Landleaguers, and Wilkie Collins's Blind Love), and to focus in a new way on critically acclaimed masterpieces (Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters and Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston). The incomplete nature of these texts has sometimes prevented literary critics from approaching them as the last important narrative testimonies on topics cogently related to Victorian culture, such as the question of moral corruption, the crisis of old narrative forms, the changing roles of ladies and gentlemen in society, the necessity of idealism in an 'age of incredulity' and the incongruities of imperial politics. This book thus offers a counter-reading of the nineteenth-century literary canon through the perspective offered by the issue of 'unending'. Using extensive quotations from primary texts, and applying an engaging and lively close analysis, Victorian Unfinished Novels: The Imperfect Page also raises thought-provoking questions on the alleged impossibility of a closed narrative ending, and on the idea of literary creation at large.