ABSTRACT
Marcella dazzles with its shrewd and vigorous staging of 1880s debates over land and work reform, the necessary violence of progress and the maneuverings of political parties, but its romantic structure comes from Scott and Austen. The closing pages of Marcella, a quick escape from the shortest of the novel's four books, are nevertheless packed with those contrarieties and disturbances that often testify to the anxiety of ending, the writing beyond the ending, in the Romance, especially the Romance of Property. The struggle between Marcella and Sir George is thus rooted in the politics of feeling, though the surface of the struggle, the debate on the Maxwell Bill, is genuinely “a representative contest between two liberties—a true battle of ideas”. The hands are making more than material goods in the transition time: they are also making their politics, the politics of Labor.
