The Future of the Post-Victorian Novel: A Speculation in Genre

Author(s): Andrea Kirchknopf

Source: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) , Fall, 2011, Vol.
17, No. 2 (Fall, 2011), pp. 351-370
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the
University of Debrecen CAHS

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43487822

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The Future of the Post-Victorian Novel: A Speculation in Genre

Andrea Kirchknopf

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Tennanťs Tess (1993) and Oscar Wilde's homosexuality as in Peter
Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) featured among the
popular topics fictionalized. Peter Ackroyd specializes in writing fictional
biographies of historical authors. Chatterton (1987), his most famous,
overarches three centuries and Dickens (1990), his most monumental,
qualifies among critics as "Ackroyd's melodrama of Victorian authorship"
(Kaplan, Victoriana 62). Julian Barnes, also interested in literary biography,
voices concerns related to the critical construction of historical authors in
Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and further engages with them in his massive Arthur
and George (2005). Considering the cult status of authors in the Victorian era,
I think that the post-Victorian rewriting of nineteenth-century authors
could also be read as a symbolic move to reinstate authorship.
After this period of reviving or debunking scandals around
Victorian authors, possibly a celebrity culture projection, a certain shift of
interest takes place towards the author's life and character in connection
with the writing process itself. The proliferation of Henry James-
biographilia provides a representative twenty-first-century example of this
change. In the late- Victorian era James fought the contemporary trend of
subordinating authorial principles to mass-market consumerism by
constructing "an authoritative image of his integrity and mastery" (Deane
xiv), apparent in his scant focus on social and political themes as well as in
his presenting more self-reflexive forms of authorial consciousness (xv). In
his seminal essay Technique as Discovery (1948), the New Critic Mark Schorer
already defines the modern novelist as someone who rigorously peruses his
medium and thereby discovers his subject matter, referring to James as a
perfect example (392). Schorer's view prevails today reflected in the
following remark of one of his adaptors: "we after-comers nevertheless
venerate James for the uncompromising subtlety and technical refinement
of his writing. He was the first English novelist to insist on fiction-writing
as an exacting art, the technique of which was available to scrutiny and
analysis" (Heyns, "The Curse of Henry James"). Moreover, the postmodern
adaptations constitute a corpus written in a spirit similar to "the portrait of
the artist" novels discussing the artist, art, and artistry.
According to critics, James's aversion to making his life public, even
resorting to burning evidence, was sooner or later inevitably bound to excite
some interest in his life and inspire attempts to fictionalize it (Kramer, "The
Secrets of the Master"). Some even claim that "[a] biographer himself,
James tried to control his biography through the selective destruction of
evidence" (Rollyson). Others explain the rising interest in turning Henry

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James's life into fiction as a possible consequence of the reinvigorating
scholarship on James, maintaining that contemporary practices focus on the
subject and its current narratives of identification, which inspires life-writing
(Kaplan, Victoriano, 64). More specifically, they argue that biographical
novels have directly developed out of the scholarship rethinking James's
social contacts, especially his personal attachments to men and women
(Saunders 123). Critical analyses such as Eric Haralson's Henry James and
Queer Modernity (2003) illustrate James's relevance for queer theory and
gender studies. This transgressiveness not only shows in the author's
uncertain sexual preferences and national or cultural belonging, but also in
his in-betweenness of two literary historical eras: the Victorian and the
modernist. Even if he mainly wrote in the tradition of the modernist
psychological novel, James still adhered to some kind of Victorian moral
imperative in his art, an intriguing combination for today's authors. Besides
embodying a fruitful subject matter, "he also presents himself as a model:
not for imitation or copying, but of an artistic ideal" (Heyns, "The Curse of
Henry James").
In 2004, novels featuring Henry James included Colm Tóibín's The
Master (2004), Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004), and David
Lodge's Author ; Author (2004). 1 Lodge's Author ; Author did not qualify for
the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín's The Master made it to the shortlist, and
Hollinghurst's The Une of Beauty eventually won the prize. None of these
novels actually names Henry James as a major character or point of
reference, but all relate to writing, while Hollinghurst's focuses on painting
as well. Their use of words like author ' master ; typewriter ; papers , line, history , and
tale illustrates a preoccupation with authorship, the authority of author and
text, as well as the life and art of storytelling. The blurb of Emma Tennant's
Felony: The Private History of The Aspern Papers (2002, first hardcover
edition) set the context for reading as well as articulating a critical interest in
the process of writing: "Felony is about the misdemeanours inherent in
writing - theft, false memory, plagiarism and greed for celebrity." Tennant
researching into the nineteenth-century Henry James inquiring into
eighteenth-century romantic texts gives an ironic twist to the Victorian
author's fear and disgust of future generations interfering with his private
life. Making him a mouthpiece for warning celebrities with something to
hide to beware of future publications of their scandals further emphasizes
the ridiculousness of this anxiety (8), not to mention that James carries out
the same notorious research for his Aspern Papers on Romantic poets that
his future biographer does on him. Critics interpret the James of Felony as a

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thief who does not refrain from any kind of stealing in order to write his
story (Rollyson). James's author friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, who
gets a share of the narrative, carries this critique further by contrasting the
writer's supreme artistic achievement with his life as an undecided bachelor
insensitive to the needs of those closest to him. She remembers overhearing
a conversation where he observed that women write very badly, so she
begins to suspect that he may not only be unable to understand women but
also specifically dislikes women who write (Tennant, Adéle 158-9). This
point of view paves the way for a feminist reading that tackles aspects of
feminist anxiety of male authorship, providing a more critical opinion not
only of James's talents as a writer, but also of his general ethical stance
towards his sources and his female colleagues.
A male author devoting his life to high art features as the main
character in James's The Lesson of the Master and is compared to the
nineteenth-century author himself in Felony , while also providing a source of
inspiration for Tóibín's The Master. Tóibín gives a convincing portrait of
how the author's focus on other people's lives that yield promising stories
affects his own life and relationships. The subject of appropriating source
material already addressed in Felony re-emerges here as intellectual theft, best
exemplified by James stealing and publishing a tale Edmund Gosse tells
him. This leads to frictions and Gosse's "objections to the art of fiction as a
cheap raid on the real and the true" (Tóibín 76), which basically amounts to
humiliating James with his own weapon. Critics claim that James's exclusive
concentration on his fictional characters left no space for the articulation of
his own desires: James behaves evasively in conversation and does not
appear any more accessible to his own private self than he does to others
(Rollyson), which obviously results in his loneliness. Tóibín's sensitive
portrayal of these vital conflicts interweaving James's life and art results in
The Masters psychological richness, characterized by Paula Marantz Cohen
as "a lovely portrait of the artist," illustrating that these novels are written in
the tradition of Yàinstlerromans .
Alan Hollinghurst's The Une of Beauty, published shortly after The
Master , has a debatable position as a biographical novel. As Kaplan
observes, this novel lacks a nineteenth-century plotline and is set in the
1980s gleam and gutter of Thatcherite Britain, therefore it is yet denied the
status of biofiction ( Victoriana 74). Still, if one considers how nineteenth-
century writers get transposed into contemporary settings in other types of
post- Victorian fiction, The lJne of Beauty can also be interpreted as a text
expanding the boundaries of biofiction in the same way. Miranda in D. M.

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Thomas's Charlotte (2001), for example, provisionally assumes the identity of
Charlotte Brontë in the West-Indies, fantasizing on the kind of life Brontë
might have had in the twentieth century, and Mr. Watts of Lloyd Jones's
Mister Pip (2006) impersonates Charles Dickens in an equally postcolonial
setting, interweaving his life story with that of Dickens's Great Expectations.
These instances indicate alternative fates for historical authors, which imply
further potentials in writing literary biographies. In this context, the
protagonist of The Une of Beauty, a young homosexual, reads as a bold
twentieth-century impersonation of Henry James. Nick Guest habitually
interweaves James quotes with his own words, which he perceives as a love
affair with the historical author (Hollinghurst 208), and he often finds
himself imitating James: for instance, when dictating long, complex
sentences to his typist in his predecessor's fashion (396). The way Nick
juxtaposes the discourse of his academic study on James with his sexual
self-discovery and the interpretation of his own experiences in the light of
Henry James's texts yields an intriguing recontextualization of the Jamesian
life-art dichotomy. Nick's failure in adapting James's The Spoils of Poynton
into a popular film script drives him to the limits of artistic compromise,
which suggests another parallel between Nick and James concerning their
attitudes to artistic production during their brief careers as playwrights. Not
being able to compromise, Nick instead starts working on a magazine called
Ogee, which he dedicates to beauty. Picking up on the moral duplicity of the
ogee curve echoing the tide's "line of beauty," James Wood draws a
comparison between Hollinghurst and James's approach to aestheticism,
concluding that by thus connecting beauty and morality Hollinghurst's text
"seems to be delivering itself of a critique only about the potential uses and
abuses of aestheticism; whereas James suggests that aestheticism is
intrinsically dangerous" (Wood, "The Ogee Curve"). The fact that such
comparisons exist between the two writers emphasizes the level of
proximity this Man Booker Prize-winning author has achieved in this work
to his Victorian predecessor in refashioning late-Victorian and early-
modernist concerns.

David Lodge's Author, Author ; published in the autumn of 2004,

could not escape comparison with the previous two novels. Critics generally
regard it as the weakest of the three, accusing the writer of too closely
following historical data (Harrison, "The Portrait of a Layabout"; Wood,
"The Spoils"). This kind of critical sensitivity implies a growing interest in
the generic differentiation between biography and biofiction, essential for
the establishment of the latter as a distinct category. Similarly to The Master ,

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Author j Author gives an account of James's crisis of authorship in his middle
years, especially that occasioned by the failure of his play Guy Domville , but it
focuses less on the loneliness of the artist split between his life and art and
more on James's literary recognition, rejections, and jealousies. Among his
social connections those that also bear importance professionally, relating to
the author's artistic production, receive the most attention. For example,
characterizing his relationship to Constance Fenimore Woolson, Henry
James admits that he communicates more easily and honestly through
fiction than in real-life situations (Lodge 169). At the end of the book,
Lodge's author enters the narrative in the guise of a literary critic expressing
his reverence towards the master assuring him of his future as an
"established classic, essential reading for anyone interested in modern
English and American literature" (375). This intrusion further complicates
Author ; Author from the point of view of genre, because besides biography
and fiction it also overtly includes literary criticism, resulting in an even
more complex hybrid form.2
Michiel Heyns's The Typewriter's Tale, rejected in the "year of Henry
James" and published only in 2005, exhibits an authorial consciousness of
writing biofiction similar to Lodge's text. In this novel, instead of the
author, the narrator, James's secretary, intrudes by appropriating the
position of a writer and attempting to compile her own novel based on
material stolen from her boss. Frieda Wroth, modeled on James's last typist,
Theodora Bosanquet, working in close proximity to the author, like
Fenimore in Felony , notes that through his exclusive devotion to his art,
James behaves in a largely insensitive way towards people around him,
especially women: "he could lose himself in analyzing the structure of a
story of a young woman affronting her destiny and disregard the daily
presence of just such a young woman in his own house" (Heyns, The
Typewriter's Tale 76 ). He remains similarly ignorant of Edith Wharton's
possible affair with his admired William Morton Fullerton, which only
surfaces through Frieda's narrative mediation of James's social contacts.
Critics see her character as a mediator of some kind of real life experience
or recognition behind the intriguing prose (Kramer, "The Secrets of the
Master"). With various instances of theft, likewise addressed in the other
adaptations, and the assumption of an authorial self, this readerly
identification immerses with a quasi-authorial one. Karen Scherzinger
points out that besides a general inquiry into authorship including the
James- Frieda- Heyns appropriative chain, the novel also reveals a "fantasy
of intimacy" with the historical author, not only by putting his textual

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originals to various uses, but also by employing mediums and telepathy to
enhance sensual closeness to him (15-16).
This abundance of novels devoted to the same subject triggered a
number of responses out of which those articulated by some of the authors
themselves appear the most interesting from the point of view of
authorship. Writers on the losing side fostered a superstitious reading of the
fate of these novels, suggesting that Henry James's curse on anyone
interfering with his private life came true (Michiel Heyns even entitled his
essay devoted to the subject "The Curse of Henry James"): literary
biographers closely engaging with the historical author's life experienced
rejection or negative criticism (Heyns, "The Curse of Henry James"; Lodge,
The Year of Henry James 39). In his The Year of Henry James : The Story of a Novel
(2006), recording the production and reception of Author ; Author , David
Lodge draws a parallel between James's efforts, frustrations, and pains of
rejection and his own similar endeavors (54). His predecessor's difficulty in
preserving readership without compromising his literary aims was a
consideration Lodge equally had to face when he switched from writing
bestsellers serialized by television to creating Author, Author , a period novel
about a celibate historical person in an elegiac tone (Lodge, The Year of Henry
James 64). 3 Heyns takes this comparison further in his essay (parts of which
Lodge also quotes in The Year of Henry James) by presenting "James's lonely
artistic integrity" as a model to his adaptors for dealing with such
disappointments, as a "proof of a dedication that so much in the modern
publishing industry conspires to discourage" (Heyns, "The Curse of Henry
James").
Though provoked by an unfortunate situation, Lodge's follow-up
book could serve as a first step towards an enquiry into the creative process
of literary adaptation, the understanding of which Hutcheon regards an
absolute necessity for the appreciation of the popularity of rewritings (107).
In addition, this work offers a further means to investigate the return of the
author. For the writer of Author, Author ; the creative process centers on the
joys of appropriating the nineteenth century, the research part of which also
involves actual literary tourism. Such trips enable the writer to establish not
only intertextual but also quasi-inspirational relationships by gaining insights
through historical locations and objects. These, sometimes overlapping,
visits4 and the unexpected competition of the ensuing works result in a type
of literary rivalry not unknown to James himself and also fictionalized in
most of the adaptations.5 Lodge's account elaborates how authorial distress
both with their subjects' and their own conflicts of personal life related to

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the creative process of writing emerges. Such conflicts sometimes turn the
twenty-first-century authors into the ghostwriters of their predecessors,
which the writer-critic interprets as one possible reason for the current
popularity of biographilia, namely "a positive and ingenious way of coping
with the 'anxiety of influence'" (Lodge, The Y ear of Herny James 10).
Besides the authorial reactions, critical responses to the Henry
James-adaptations also mark telling sites of current engagements with
biographical fiction. Kaplan, for example, reads three of these five texts, The
Master , Author, Author ; and The Une of Beauty , with a focus on anxieties
connected with masculinity, writing, and authorship, concluding that the
past and present exposure of these as vulnerable leads to the recognition of
"a more paradoxical and contradictory masculine - and literary -
subjectivity" ( Victoriana 78). This view provides an important critical angle
to the authors' self-reflexive comments on the anxiety of authorship. Max
Saunders suspects a potential narcissistic drive behind fictional recreations
of the dead author, whereby contemporary writers create their own
authorial persona through voicing concerns similar to their nineteenth-
century predecessor (127). This assumption sounds plausible considering
that James's controversially documented life yields a perfect locus for the
projection of various authorial sensibilities. Lodge, for example, invites
comments on the basis of the title of his work Author ; Author as one that
aims for a cohabitation of the author position (Scherzinger 10), leading to
the conclusion that adaptations of such kind will trigger a change in literary
criticism toward "a participatory collaboration of reading, writing, theory
and . . . scholarship" (Scherzinger 19-20). Such authorial and critical
reactions aptly show how the genre of biofiction and literary criticism
interact in their engagement with the writing process, life and writing,
representations of life and writing, literary reception and reactions to literary
reception, increasingly collapsing the boundaries of text and critique in the
process.
On this basis, it can be expected that the literary agency of authors
and authors as fictional characters will become more extensively explored in
the future. Barnes's Arthur and George (2005) marks a longish example of
such an exploration, where a parallel account of the lives and interaction of
George Edalji, a wrongly sentenced Parsee solicitor, and Arthur Conan
Doyle, the renowned writer who fights for Edalji's reinstatement, acquires
relevance in connection with the creation of the Sherlock Holmes series.
Such a focus on authors and their writing process further questions
posterity's authority over the life and texts of historical writers. Taking into

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account the trust the readership puts into historical facts, the prefaces of
some of these literary biographies reverse the usual warning about the
entirely fictitious nature of characters and advocate claims for the opposite
only allowing for fiction in the case of lack of facts leaving room for
speculation (Lodge, "Preface," Author, Author, Tennant, "Author's Note,"
Adéle). Critics argue for keeping a healthy balance between biography and
fiction (Miller 169) or for the indissoluble difference between the two
(Kaplan, Victoriana 65), yet, the shift in terminology signifies the primacy of
fiction: literary biography slowly transforms into biofiction.
It seems then that from being one type of biography, the subgenre
of literary biography has gone a long way toward making the biographical
into one kind of fiction. In his review of a biography on Anthony Burgess,
tellingly entitled "Thrice Told Tales," Akos I. Farkas more than once refers
to a fictional biography by Vladimir Nabokov to warn of the limits of
biography as a genre. Even if one aims for meticulousness in every respect
to maintain the documentary factuality of the life of a historical person,
such a venture proves impossible by definition as the authentic source of
information is already dead, but even if (s)he were alive, (s)he would
confabulate the story, not to mention the listener who functions as yet
another filter shaping the original account, hence the thrice told tales (313-
318). Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth (2001) provides another good example
of a critique processing this shift of biography towards the fictional. The
scholar traces how Charlotte Bronte's biography has been subjected to
various myths and critical schools of thought in the last two centuries, not
to mention its fictional appropriations. Depending on the disciplinary
background, terms such as life-writing or psychobiography emerge that may
prove useful in further elaborations of the biofiction genre. Similarly,
Saunders's constitution of biofiction as a four-part hybrid consisting of
biography, autobiography, fiction, and criticism (126) exemplifies how the
genre's terminological refinement has already begun.

Adaptive series: The case of Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair

Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair presents an intriguing example of
interrogating the connections of literary production and reception, their
impact on literary value and its relations with authorship and celebrity
culture. In addition to expanding the interpretive horizon of the so-far
surveyed adaptations of previous authors, texts, and topoi, the novel at the
same time points towards a second largely popular trend in post- Victorian
fiction: the reintroduction of the novel sequel. Contemporary adaptive

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series expand the nineteenth-century understanding of this generic mode as
a series of plots involving the same characters, produced more or less in a
chronological order. They not only purposefully distort the timeline, but
also fragment the narrative by adding more perspectives to the same events,
not to mention the use of postmodern narrative devices such as parody and
pastiche. But adaptations precisely tend to aim for such distortions: they
disrupt chronologies as well as deconstruct the concepts of authorship and
originality, thus affecting the literary canon. Hutcheon identifies this
subversive potential of adaptations' shifting power relations as one of the
reasons for their popularity (174), and Julie Sanders attributes to the same
feature assistance in promoting their academic study (98). I also think that
these shifts take place on the interpretive level. On the one hand, critical
analysis focuses on more items of the adaptive map simultaneously instead
of just tackling one text: discussions of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre rarely
occur without a mention of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), for
example. On the other hand, adaptive texts themselves tend to include
intertextual references to more than one "original": D. M. Thomas's
Charlotte comprises an adaptation of both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea,6
Some postmodern adaptations completely disrupt the chronological,
narrative, and plot references to nineteenth-century texts, in which cases the
terms adaptive chain or adaptive series seem insufficient to incorporate all
possible relationships between adaptations and their source-texts, thus the
term adaptive map.
Derivatives from Dickens's life and texts, commonly called
Dickensiana, form such a complex map of adaptations, for example. The
best-known Dickens appropriator Peter Ackroyd's repertoire of
refashionings ranges from rewriting one of the Victorian author's texts into
a novel (Little Dornt in The Great Fire of London [1982]), through referring to
numerous of his texts in a chapter of a novel ( English Music [1992]) to
creating a monumental ali-integrative biofiction of the nineteenth-century
classic (. Dickens [1990]). Due to its saturation in the Dickens-experience,
critics regard Charles Palliser's The Qunicunx (1989) as an attempt to
reproduce all Dickens novels (Malone 1990: 12). Novels positioned on the
adaptive map of Dickensiana as ones mainly derived from one source-text
include Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997) and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip as both
refashion Dickens's Great Expectations from a postcolonial perspective.
Critics argue that Jack Maggs writes back to Great Expectations as Wide Sargasso
Sea writes back to Jane Eyre: it reverses most of the original situations and
disfavors the dominant Anglo-centric discourse in parallel to rehabilitating

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the Australians (Letissier 124). In turn, in Mister Pip the Australians try to
gain more power over the island of Papua New Guinea, by provoking
ethnic and civil conflicts among the inhabitants. Such a postcolonial setting
triggers a more complex use of the Victorian original. Lloyd Jones doubly
rewrites Pip's story into twentieth-century narratives: on the one hand, it
becomes interwoven with the autobiography of Mr Watts, who in the
course of events identifies himself both with Pip and Charles Dickens, and,
on the other hand, it enhances the native character-narrator, Mathilda's
breakout from the war-stricken Bougainville, New Zealand, traveling both
to Australia and England. Most importantly, Great Expectations also
functions as a cultural memento provoking wars, ruining and saving lives,
lost, stolen, burnt, and recreated, in other words, an object whose
materiality and fictional content undergo a series of changes very much like
those of the Victorian text employed in The Eyre Affair.
Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair takes up a peculiar position in the
canon: it functions as a first book of the heroine's serialized experiences as a
literary detective as well as a sequel on the adaptive map of Jane Eyre.
Besides showing a theoretical awareness of authorship, adaptation, and
originality, the novel also concerns itself with postcolonial and postimperial
identities. All these receive attention in a predominantly entertaining mode
and with considerable metafictional input, yielding an intriguing generic
mixture of comic, detective, and science fiction. This text convincingly
exemplifies, therefore, how these interests interact in current post-Victorian
fiction.

The Eyre Affair maintains two parallel realms of action: one part of
the plot takes place in an Orwellian England in the 1980s and the other
occurs in the fictional world of Jane Eyre. The ending of the Victorian novel
interweaves the two settings. The story finishes by Jane going to India to
work with St. John Rivers, an ending late-twentieth-century readers dislike.
Rochester also refuses to accept such a conclusion, and once the twentieth-
century literary detective called Thursday Next enters the novel through the
futuristic Prose Portal, he uses her as his assistant7 for changing it to Jane
and Rochester marrying instead, which supplies the contested ending we
know now. "The Brontë Society" and other authorities oppose Thursday's
intervention but the "Brontë for the People" popular organization overrules
objections realizing how much more the readers admire the novel after this
interference. In return for the detective's kindness, Rochester also interferes
with the twentieth-century plot by sending the same lawyer who spoke up at
his first marriage attempt to Jane to save Landen, Thursday's lover from a

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disastrous marriage to another woman. Once that relationship gets rectified
as well, the literary detective accepts another important task, but instead of
its further specification, the novel ends.
This plot, centered on the fate of creative pieces both in the phase
of their production and reception, raises a number of controversial issues.
Firstly, how much power do publishers and readers have in shaping the
final version of a literary text? which appears a legitimate question for an
author who has entered the domain of literature through the doors of the
film industry. Fforde concedes that he chose Jane Eyre as the central
intertextual reference for his novel because he assumed that readers would

be familiar with its plot (Fforde, "Beginnings"), which already carries the
grains of the ensuing interactive novelistic production both within and
outside the text. The conflict between academic and popular institutions
interested in the Brontë novel echoes the dichotomy between texts of
aesthetic value and bestsellers that I pointed out in the discussion of the
Henry James novels. Here, it finds an integrative solution whereby elitist
and non-elitist aspects of reading become juxtaposed.8 The readers' agency,
prompted by the open ending of The Eyre Affair and the address of the
website on the back cover of the book, materializes in comments and
adaptations online which have by now evolved into a whole fictional
universe. Some fans even reproduce in real life the fictional act of Jane and
Rochester naming their second child Helen Thursday Rochester in Fforde's
novel by naming their children after characters in the book (Fforde,
"Thursday"). They also organize special commercial events such as the 2008
Fforde Fiesta (Fforde, "Ffiesta08") buying and selling relics related to the
novel series the detective's adventures have since grown into.9 This course
of events well exemplifies what Sanders describes as a successful marriage
of high and low culture triggered by the genre of the novel, arguing that the
suspense-creating publishing of installments of canonical texts in the
nineteenth century resurfaces today in similar serial modes of cultural
production (122).
The chronology of both the fictional events and our reading of
different rewritings of the same text leads to some difficulty in determining
the "original" among adaptations. Critics react to this problem by orienting
the reader through refining terminology: Wide Sargasso Sea reads a prequel to
Jane Eyre , while Charlotte constitutes its sequel, and following the same logic,
narratives retelling the same story from other characters' perspectives, such
as Emma Tennant's Adéle : Jane Eyre's Hidden Story (2002), The French Dancer's
Bastard: The Story of Adéle from Jane Eyre (2006), and Thornfield Hall: Jane Eyrie's

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Hidden Story (2007), could then be termed midquels10 or paraquels. Even if
the same author, Emma Tennant, wrote all editions in the case of this last
text, a confusion of titles further complicates the originality debate as
different publications bear different tides and earlier versions get revised for
various audiences.

For understanding the status of The Eyre Affair, the term parallelquel
needed to be coined to depict fiction with a storyline running parallel to a
canonical novel, thus "breaking] the rules of continuity by proposing an
alternative text that interrogates the workings of the original" (Berninger
and Thomas 186). This interrogation develops into a complete confusion as
The Eyre Affair seems to provide us with the genuine ending of Jane Ejre ,
making the version so-far believed to be the original into an alternative one
(188). With such a distortion of our chronological reading process, the
reconstruction of an "original" plot, that is, our understanding of the plot
on the basis of the historically first text, becomes problematic, consequendy
testing any text's claim of owning the status of the "original." This also
finds a parodie echo within the novel by the paradox of obviously
questioning the existence of a detectable genuine script, yet making
characters literally kill each other for the Jane Ejre manuscript insisting that
"[a]ll copies anywhere on the planet, in whatever form, originate from that
first act of creation. When the original changes, all the others have to
change, too" (Fforde, The Eyre Affair 208).
To ensure the consistency of the Victorian text, Fforde abducts Jane
from the novel thereby making any interference with the story told in her
first person narrative impossible. As the author confesses, it took a three-
year writer's block to arrive at this solution because he did not want to
commit "literary heresy" by putting too many extra words in Jane's mouth
(Fforde, "Beginnings"). A similar imprinting also appears at the textual level
when twentieth-century readers protest about changes to their favorite
Victorian novel caused by the abduction. Critics argue that Fforde's implied
readers would probably have done the same, had the original canonized
version not been maintained with the only addition being a parallel ironic
perspective to it by recontextualizing some of the plot moves (Rubik 175-
79). As critics have argued, Fforde not only paid homage to the original
storyline, but also to characters: in Thursday Next's remarkable similarities
to Jane and Landen's to Rochester in various respects as well (Wells 200-
03). In addition, the two endings, both attributable to Charlotte Brontë due
to the twists in the plot, function as a kind of homage, raising the profile of

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the historical author and providing even more space for speculation related
to authorial creativity and intention.
Hence, critics mosdy read The Eyre Affair as an entertaining tribute
to Jane Eyre which reinforces the canon (Berninger and Thomas 184; Wells
205-06). I think it could also be read as an allegory of the writing process,
implying through the case of Jane Ejre how novels come into being or are
continuously in the making, thus bringing the productive and receptive ends
of the process closer, which indeed may affect long-term canon formation.
Besides illustrating writing, F forde 's text can also be read as a satirical
comment on the whole enterprise of rewriting: when the readership and the
authorities notice that the ending has been revised, they regard the pastiche
as "pure Charlotte Brontë but it definitely wasn't there before!" (Fforde, The
Eyre Affair 346). This remark sounds at least ambivalent, partly confirming
characters', readers', and critics' keenness on Bronte's original ending, but
partly also emphasizing that in the metafictional game of rewriting the
"revision" to acquire the "original" these concepts lose their points of
reference.

As Sanders argues, adaptations are prone to express and supply

alternatives for problematic political positions (98). One such pressing
contemporary issue, also addressed in The Eyre Affair, is the (re)imagination
of English identity. The novel responds to this concern by contextualizing
postcolonial and postimperial anxieties, such as Britain's relationship to its
historical empire and the consequences of the devolution of power.
Colonial struggles take place in the surreal framework of time travel, which
seems to confirm some critics' view that metropolitan Britain has for a long
time been imagined as part of but still separate from the Empire, portrayed "as
an 'island nation' mosdy untroubled by its imperial project" (Hall and Rose 20-
21). The Crimean war gets fictionalized as one that has lasted for the past
hundred and thirty years involving the testing of the cold war-like weapons of
the reigning corporation and dividing public opinion: Agreeing with the
industrial entrepreneurs, war veterans argue for its continuation until their final
victory otherwise they feel that all the loss of lives were wasted, while others
think that "[w]hat we began as an excuse to curb Russia's expansionism in 1854
. . . has collapsed over the years into nothing more than an exercise to maintain
the nation's pride . . (Fforde, The Eyre Affair 8). This exposes Britain's
desperate clinging to its historical empire, further emphasized by the
interventions of agents like Thursday's father, whose task involves the
adjustment of historical events in favor of the British.

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 Colonial and postimperial conflicts feature together: immediately after
the television broadcast of the Crimean war, a report on the English-Welsh
conflict follows. Wales, a socialist republic since 1854, remains independent
from, but constantly threatened and mistreated by, England:

The next news item was about a border skirmish with the People's Republic
of Wales; no one hurt, just a few shots exchanged across the River Wye near
Hay. Typically rambunctious, the youthful president-for-life Owain Glyndwr
VII had blamed England's imperialist yearnings for a unified Britain; equally
typically, Parliament had not so much as even made a statement about the
incident. (9)

This kind of fictional relationship between the two most connected countries in
post-imperial Britain, obviously points towards the difficulties in working out
new identities and forms of governance among entities left over from the
empire, unmasking what Susan Bassnett calls one of the most misleading
British myths: the idea of a single island whose island people form a collective
against the rest of the world, an idea that has long supplied a convenient cover-
up for internal difficulties (500). Fforde has invented Victorian events as they
could have been and gives a detailed account of these on his webpage entitled
'The Socialist Republic of Wales (Fforde, "Sovietreppage"), which provides a
good example of Kaplan's argument about the functioning of literary sources:
"in the fantasmatic register in which literature operates an alternative history
opens up, with a complicated narrative of its own, but one that is at the same
time constitutive of the social real, representing most eloquently and sometimes
scarily its affective dimensions" ('Imagining'' 211).
From a social aspect the novel shows both Utopian and dystopian
characteristics: perceptions of love reproduce romance cliches in a criminal
society governed by corrupt global industrial powers. Thursday and Landen's
union in the twentieth-century plot reproduces Jane and Rochester's marriage
with unlikely interventions and coincidences, while England features as an
Orwellian police state full of crimes triggered by literature, cloning and time
travel as everyday realities and wars with ex-colonies and other island countries
provoked for profits in the weapon industry by global economic powers.
The Eyre Affair blends elements of the Gothic, realism, romance, and
the fairy tale. Still, the novel is mostly categorized as detective and science
fiction (Wehrmann 149; Beminger and Thomas 186), traits of which emerge
through the emplotted mysteries and crimes to unravel, and by the use of
motifs such as time travel and genetic engineering in an alternative history

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fantasy. Parallel to time travel, book travel11 also features in the novel, which
means that literary tourism takes place not only to famous places connected to
canonical works, but also into the works themselves, thus the action happens
simultaneously in the alternative world of Britain in the 1980s and the fictional
world of the Victorian novel Jane Eyre, The Eyre Affair, therefore, is a novel that
extends the concept of temporal disjunction that Simon Gikandi attributes to
nineteenth-century travel narratives, comparing England in a state of crisis and
(post)colonial regions as monuments of the successful empire (105), into both
a temporal and a spatial disjunction, equipping the historical novel with yet
another tool to illustrate today's social and political issues.
As a surreal plot of alternative history, the novel includes many comic
moments trivializing nineteenth-century romance and Gothic elements.
Thursday's intervention in the plot of Jane Eyre provides one such example,
supplying a parodical explanation to the scene generally perceived as
melodramatic: she reveals the supernatural call that makes Jane return to
Rochester as her imitation: "I had . . . gone to her window and barked: Jane,
Jane, Jane!' in a hoarse whisper the way that Rochester did. It wasn't a good
impersonation but it did the trick. I saw Jane start to fluster and pack almost
immediately" (Fforde, The Eyre Affair 347). Rochester as a Byronie hero
receives a similarly comic bent when it turns out that in Jane's absence from
Thornfield he guides literary tourists through the house to make some extra
money, while the Christian tradition gets questioned as a vampire politely warns
Thursday that satanic creatures do not dread the Christian cross any more since
they come from a multicultural background (Rubik 175-78; Berninger and
Thomas 188-89). Such novelistic conventions that were popular in the
nineteenth century become at once reinforced and revised in current
adaptations.
I expect an ongoing proliferation of post-Victorian novels prioritizing
biofiction and adaptive series of texts as well as extending the generic scale to
include comic, detective, and science fiction, utopias, and dystopias as fresh
ways to approach pressing contemporary political, social, cultural, and
theoretical issues while also manipulating the production and reception of
literary texts. It remains to be seen how these developments influence the
recontextualization of post-Victorian fiction into the larger body of
contemporary British novels, but what appears quite certain, however, is that
the future increasingly belongs to the rewrites of the rewrites.

Central European University

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 Notes
1 Henry James inspired numerous other novels both prior to and after 2004, such
as Carol de Chellis Hill's Henry James's Midnight Song (1993), Kathryn Kramer's Sweet Water
(1998), Edmund White's Hotel de Dream (2007) and Cynthia Ozick's Dictation (2008), which,
though given less attention, demonstrate the nineteenth-century author's ongoing appeal.
2 Term taken from Saunders (126).
3 Lodge's author-narrator criticizes the use of the term bestsellers itself on the
basis of its etymology in Author, Author, obviously a non-bestseller: he points out that this
compound carries with it a confusion of quality and quantity, consequently one cannot
have more than one bestseller (326).
4 Heyns recorded one of these visits in the course of which Tóibín, Lodge, and
Heyns all appeared at Lamb House for their research. This account sounds like a perfect
first sentence of a Gothic novel: "Lamb House, James's retreat from publicity and scanda
and inquiry, had become the site of betrayal: the tower of art had been scaled, the enemy
was within the walls. We defied the prohibitions of the man in order to bring tribute to the
master" (Heyns, "The Curse of Henry James").
5 James's rivalry with Constance Fenimore Woolson and George du Maurier, both
of whom were more successful during their lifetime than the author himself, gets
fictionalized in Felony and Author, Author , respectively.
6 Various critics have attempted to organize jane Eyre adaptations in order to
establish some kind of relationship among the ever-growing number of texts engaging with
the novel. Patsy Stoneman's Bronte Transformations : The Cultural Dissemination tf/Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights (1996) has proved a seminal work in this respect exhaustively
documenting and summarizing reactions to the Victorian text from within a few years of its
publication until the mid-1990s. Apart from some classic refashionings also addressed by
Stoneman, a more recent collection entided A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedia
Re workings of]zne Eyre (2007) additionally includes twenty- first-century responses to the
nineteenth-century novel.
7 The name Thursday Next and her supportive role to Rochester are reminiscent
of Friday's name and function in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719).
8 Fforde's novēlis tic resolution positions him on the popular side of the argument
which could be read as his literary testimony to what he always underlines in his interviews,
namely his lack of university training and the claim that "classics had become stuffy
through being academized" (Wells 198, n. 4).
9 The series consists of the following tides: Lost in a Good Book (2002), The Well of
Tost Plots (2003), Something Rotten (2004), First Among Sequels (2007) and One of Our Thursdays
is Missing (201 1).
10 Term taken from Berninger and Thomas, (183).
11 Term taken from Berninger and Thomas (Berninger and Thomas 186).

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