Notes Introduction: The Sense of Unending. Closing Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Emma’ 1. Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, with a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, ed. Margaret Smith, 3 vols (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1995–2004), I, p. 319, my italics. From now on indicated as Letters. 2. Philip Rhodes, ‘A Medical Appraisal of the Brontës’, Brontë Society Transactions, 16.82 (1972), p. 107. Winifred Gérin writes that Charlotte’s ‘death certificate made no mention of her pregnancy; it gave “Phthisis” as the sole cause of death, uniting her thus, as if proof of any closer ties were needed, with the sisters and brother who had gone before [...]. Little Dr. Dugdale, barely begin- ning his long career [...], carried into old age the regret and humiliation of losing his first – and most illustrious – patient. Of all the babies he lost, he used to say, the one that grieved him most was Charlotte Brontë’s’. Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 566. 3. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 2. 4. See Robert Keffe, Charlotte Brontë’s World of Death (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1979), and John Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 5. Alfred Tennyson, Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), p. 128. 6. As for Emily Brontë, critics agree that she had probably begun to write a fol- low-up to Wuthering Heights. This opinion is supported by the presence of a letter (now at the Brontë Parsonage Museum) written by editor T. C. Newby, concerning his ‘great pleasure in making arrangement for [her] next novel’. Then Newby asks Emily ‘not to let it go before the world, until well satisfied with it’. Qtd. in Edward Chitham, The Birth of ‘Wuthering Heights’: Emily Brontë at Work (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 194. Given Charlotte Brontë’s doubts on the moral stance of Emily’s successful first novel and her profound dislike for Newby, many scholars speculate that Charlotte probably destroyed her sister’s manuscript. In this respect, see also Juliet Barker’s The Brontës (London: Abacus, 2010), p. 631. 7. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, eds. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), p. 496. 8. With reference to ‘Emma’, F. B. Pinion writes that ‘[one wonders] how much more Charlotte would have matured as a writer had she lived, and had her unimaginative husband encouraged her to write’. A Brontë Companion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), p. 156. In an unpublished letter to Mrs Humphry Ward (dated 28 November 1899), Arthur Bell Nicholls made his position clear as far as his attitudes to Charlotte as a writer were concerned, saying that he ‘never interfered in the slightest degree with her liberty of action’. Qtd. in Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë, p. 554. 148 Notes 149 9. Qtd. in ‘Appendix VI. “Emma”’, in Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, eds. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 303–4. The Clarendon edition includes all textual variants and correc- tions to the manuscript of ‘Emma’. A letter written by Charlotte has been the object of much dispute. It describes her ambivalent feelings as a newly- wed: ‘Since I came home I have not had an unemployed moment; my life is changed indeed – to be wanted continually – to be constantly called for and occupied seems so strange; yet it is a marvellously good thing. As yet I don’t quite understand how some wives grow so selfish – As far as my experience of matrimony goes – I think it tends to draw you away from yourself’. Letter to Ellen Nussey, 9 August 1854, in Letters, III, p. 283. 10. As Thackeray wrote in a letter to William Smith Williams dated 23 October 1847, ‘I wish you had not sent me “Jane Eyre”. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it’. Thackeray did also succeed in inferring the sex of Currer Bell, admitting ‘[it] is a woman’s writ- ing, but whose?’. The Letters and Private Papers of W. M. Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), II, pp. 318–19. 11. ‘The Last Sketch. Emma’, by W. M. Thackeray, in Charlotte Brontë, Unfinished Novels (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1993), p. 97. All further quotations from ‘Emma’ will be referred to this edition. 12. The fragment entitled ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’, divided into five parts and narrated by different narrators, centres on William Ellin, an orphan abused by his violent stepbrother Edward, who lives in Golpit and who has taken possession of the family property (come to him in his mother’s right). Little William Ellin, aged ten, seeks refuge at Ellin Balcony after having run away from Golpin, and asks old Mrs Hill, the solitary housekeeper, to help him. After ‘Willie’ is rescued by his brutal stepbrother, he is first defended by a merchant named Mr Bosas (who sometimes resides at Golpin), and then comforted by a girl aged 17 after he is again beaten by Edward. 13. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 70. According to Lyndall Gordon, who reflects on the character of Matilda, ‘we are, again, at the frontier of a new religion. Its indigenous nature is no longer an unprotected and physically maltreated boy but an unprotected and mentally tormented girl [...]. “What” is the crucial word in the whole piece [...]. This is the real question. The true mystery, which of course cannot be answered in a girl’s school concerned only with the question, “Who are you?”, which required a social answer’. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. 289–90. 14. To date, there are countless spurious completions of Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and half a dozen contemporary novels directly or indirectly inspired by it (on this particular aspect, see the beginning of Chapter 1). As for Stevenson, St. Ives was completed by Arthur Quiller Couch and, more recently, by Jenni Calder (see Chapter 3). The BBC1 costume drama Wives and Daughters, broadcast in 1999 (adapted by Andrew Davies, directed by Nick Renton and produced by Sue Birtwistle), is the most famous completion of Gaskell’s last novel. Andrew Davies’s screen version and in particular his conclusion, which features Molly Gibson accepting Roger Hamley’s proposal and joining him in his African expeditions, has been widely acclaimed by literary critics and Gaskellian scholars. In particular, it has been praised as 150 Notes a respectful rendering of Gaskell’s unfinished work into another semiotic system. See Patsy Stoneman, ‘Wives and Daughters on Television’, The Gaskell Society Journal, 14 (2000), pp. 85–100. 15. Armelle Parey, in her analysis of Boylan’s Emma Brown, defines and classi- fies the novel’s genre as follows: ‘Boylan’s proleptic continuation of Brontë’s unfinished manuscript is a neo-Victorian pastiche. Boylan slips into Brontë’s style and discourse, borrowing from her letters and her published novels, and takes a step aside with them. Relying on other Victorian novels and genres, Boylan goes down paths unvisited by the Victorian novelist in order to shed light on unclear aspects of the area and to revise female portraits while maintaining a tight anchoring in the historical context’ (translated by the author). Armelle Parey, ‘“Will not the leaf be turned some day, and the story be told?”: Emma Brown (2003) de Clare Boylan et Charlotte Brontë, un pastiche néo-victorien’, Conference ‘L’inachevé/The Unfinished’, University of Caen, 9–10 December 2011. 16. Clare Boylan and Charlotte Brontë, Emma Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), p. 171. 17. D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. xi, xiv. According to Miller, ‘closure, though it implies resolution, never really resolves the dilemmas raised by the narratable. In essence, closure is an act of “make- believe”, a postulate that closure is possible’, p. 287. 18. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, transl. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 88, 72–3. 19. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 6. 20. Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, with a New Epilogue (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 7, p. 54. In Walter Benjamin’s view, what readers look for in narrative fiction is that very knowledge of death that is denied to them. For Benjamin, ‘[death] is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell’. ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Likolai Leskov’ (1936), in Illuminations, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 94. Marianna Torgovnick writes that ‘in completing the “circle” of a novel, endings create the illusion of life halted and poised for analysis. Like completed segments of human lives and representations of them, completed stories illuminate and invite examination of human experiences’. Closure in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 5. 21. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, with an Introduction by Michael Wood (London: Granta Books, 1985), p. 84. 22. Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in The Art of Criticism: Henry James and the Theory and Practice of Fiction, eds William Veeder and Susan Griffin (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1986), p. 168. In his essay entitled ‘Anthony Trollope’ (1883), James criticised Trollope’s use of the intrusive and omniscient narrator.