Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance (review)

If inheritances ‘change destinies and instigate stories,’ as Allan Hepburn observes in introducing Troubled Legacies, his collection makes the point that inheritances do so by swerving from or disturbing lines of transmission. His point is not surprising since narrative requires disequilibrium, but the notion of ‘troubled legacy’ is especially pertinent to the tense relations (political, familial, national, literary) at issue in this volume of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish fiction. Nor is it an accident that in a volume investigating different forms of inheritable property, from tangible landed estates to the intangible ‘property’ of national identity and literary tradition, the troubling existence of Ireland in an uneasy United Kingdom should form a prominent thread. Primarily a set of readings, Troubled Legacies is pulled together by an insistent interest in how issues of tradition, allegiance, and belonging coming from the past bear on the definition and redefinition of modern identities, both personal and transpersonal, in the novels under discussion. The dominant theme, however, is fiction’s negotiation of inheritance in relation to the national and cultural identities central to personal subjectivities.

Questions of national identity focus the first cluster of essays. Patrick O’Malley opens with an essay on Sydney Owenson’s foundational national tale, The Wild Irish Girl, which argues that Owenson’s attempt at a reconciliation of Ireland and England hinges on the erasure of Catholic Ireland and its past. Equally skeptical of the conciliations offered by national tales, Ann Gaylin reads Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas as unravelling their binary structure, and presents the Anglo-Irish themselves as the ‘uncanny’ that allows for such unravelling. Turning to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Natalie Rose approaches it as a rewriting of Burkean models of inheritance, in part under the pressure of debates over race and nation in the 1870s. In doing so, her essay makes perceptive play with the often overlooked Irishness of Lydia Glasher. The strongest essay in this cluster is an intriguing reading of Trollope’s Palliser series by Sara Maurer, which shows not only how Ireland haunts these novels but, more originally, how they seek to induce in their English readers an ‘Irish state of mind,’ in the sense of producing a feeling of national identification that remains necessarily vicarious. Her argument is articulated through a notion of ‘displaced enjoyment’ attached to both marital and national union, providing a fresh take on their often observed conjunction.

While the Irish motif remains in play in the rest of the collection – indeed, one of the strengths of the volume is its interweaving of motifs and issues – the final six essays move into the foreground questions of literary inheritance and ideas about property and gender. Carol Davison ‘reopens’ The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by stressing its gothic roots, while Jay Dickson offers an alert analysis of how Forster deploys the motif of sudden death in novels like The Longest Journey to work out his own ambivalent relationship to a Victorian legacy both personal and literary. Bradley Clissold’s essay on Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, downplaying the novel’s Irish context, links Joyce’s ‘disinheritance’ plot to the period’s fascination with theories of heredity. Also downplaying Irishness, Maria DiBattista produces an eloquent meditation on Elizabeth Bowen’s wrestling with the difficulty of transmitting a novelist’s intangible ‘estate.’ Turning to a much more tangible property, Allan Hepburn looks at Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, noting that property tends to drift away from men to women in late modernist fiction and arguing that Waugh’s novel is symptomatic of a recognition that the very disruption of traditional inheritance patterns opened up entry for the culturally ambitious middle class. The volume concludes with an essay by Jason Polley on Banville’s recent fiction wherein women are given a voice, as well as property, but makes clear at the same time that they gain an identity precisely when property loses its significance. In this way, Polley suggests, Banville ‘liberates...