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, Alfred 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, 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.

About the Author
Millgate is author of the acclaimed Hardy: A Biography (Clarendon Paperback), Thomas Hardy Collected, Selected Letters, and editor of Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems (NOES, 1963, reissued 1973)

Reviews
detailed, elegantly-written and acutely thoughtful book ... he traces marvellously the aims and consequences of "explicit and implicit testamentary acts". * Sunday Telegraph *
lucid yet magnificently detailed narratives * Times Higher Education Supplement *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198183662
Author Michael Millgate
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Clarendon Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Dimensions(mm) 217mm * 139mm * 17mm