Publisher's Synopsis
The testamentary acts of Michael Millgate's title are those strategies of self-protection and self-projection - textual and personal, before and after death - by which authors seek in old age to enhance posterity's view of themselves and their work. The four figures examined here in detail - Robert Browning, Afred Tennyson, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy - sought to maintain their personal privacy and control the integrity of their texts by, for example, destroying documents, writing autobiographies, collaborating in "official" biographies, revising their earlier works and supplying them with retrospective prefaces, and publishing so-called "collected" editions that omitted items they no longer wished to preserve. These and other strategies have been widely practised by writers, but can have altogether unanticipated results; and this study also examines the difficult role of such literary executors as Pen Browining, Hallam Tennyson, and Florence Hardy, called upon to exercise a delegated, hence compromised, authority.;The wills and wishes of many other literary figures, from Samuel Johnson to Walt Whitman to Philip Larkin, occupy the final section, which emphasizes the importance for contemporary biographers and editors of attention to these end-games - to the often disregarded final years to writers, and to both the intentions and the consequences of their explicit and implicit testamentary acts.
