ABSTRACT
On 5 November 2011 a conference on the Brontës was held at the University of London Institute of English Studies. I heard the contribution Barbara made to it. Quite distinct from the mark of the formal academic paper, her contribution was a stunning reading from her recently published collection of short stories, Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts. This collection weaves haunting narratives from the lacunae, loose ends, and unspoken possibilities in the endings of the great novels of the nineteenth century — the forever hidden narrative secrets in Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, for example. Her Jane Eyre story, the one she read on that occasion, was about the forgotten history of Adèle, Rochester’s illegitimate daughter. What happens to her? Jane and Rochester’s baby son grows apace, but what of the illegitimate child in this triad? Barbara’s story wonderfully intuits Rochester’s egocentric uneasiness about his daughter, a feeling that has been lying in Charlotte Brontë’s narrative, awaiting development. In another marvellous reading of the unsaid, she picks up on one of the final sentences in the Conclusion to The Mill on the Floss. One of the two men who visited the tomb of Tom and Maggie Tulliver ‘visited the tomb again with a sweet face beside him’. The unwary reader, and the reader longing to assuage the pain of this novel, might assume that the ‘sweet face’ was that of Lucy, accompanying Stephen Guest on his pilgrimage of love and penitence and expressing her own forgiveness. But not Barbara. She understands George Eliot’s reticence, her refusal of easy gratification, and builds imaginatively upon it.
