Literary Collaboration in Late Victorian Britain

The focus of the present thesis is the phenomenon of literary collaboration for fiction-writing during a period when it was particularly widespread: from 1870 to the end of the Victorian age. Collaboration in novel writing had been practised sporadically since the eighteenth century, but the late nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented expansion, probably as the result of an increasingly composite and competitive literary market. Around 1890, it became a literary fashion, so much so that almost all popular novelists of the time experienced it at least once. However popular, virtually all coauthored novels soon plunged into oblivion. The present research seeks the causes for such decline in the very context of these novels' production and reception, exploring how coauthorship was a controversial practice since its very beginning. Indeed, the sharing of textual spaces and the dispersion of authority complicated deep-seated, post-Romantic notions of authorship and textuality; within collaborative writing, the author turned into something different from what Victorians were accustomed to imagining. Chapter 1 presents a survey of the phenomenon's importance and of its impact on the late Victorian literary marketplace. The following chapter discusses the ten-year long literary partnership of the two English friends Walter Besant and James Rice, who made collaboration popular and whose alliance remained an influential model for the subsequent decades. Chapter 3 analyses another pair of long-term coauthors, the Anglo-Irish cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, who signed their works Somerville and Ross. They coauthored fiction for thirty years, and their complex emotional relationship shaped their literary partnership in meaningful ways. Chapter 4 investigates some examples of one-time collaborative experiences of the 1890s, when the practice was at its peak: H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang; Rhoda Broughton and Elizabeth Bisland; and the collaboration of twenty-four novelists on the sensational 'The Fate of Fenella.' Chapter 5 looks at the discourse that developed in the British press around collaboration: drawing on a corpus of original late Victorian articles and reviews, it tries to shed some light on how the Victorian public reacted to, perceived and represented the act of coauthoring a work of fiction. Some trends are identified, in order to understand which aspects of collaboration particularly struck the Victorian imagination. The heated debate on coauthorship spurred further discussion on wider issues connected with authorship and copyright, both questions of paramount importance in the Victorian age, which are explored in chapter 6. This last part considers the ways in which the author figure emerging from the collaborative process challenged and subverted - even if only temporarily - hegemonic conceptions of author-ity.