Chapter 12 - Fiction as Critique

Summary

The late Barbara Hardy’s chapter traces the ways in which the creative imagination allows access to the spaces between authorial design and academic interpretation, from whence new insights and ways of understanding the original text might emanate. Hardy provides authorial insight into her volume of nineteenth-century postscripts, which work precisely to tease out loose threads and weave material into ‘hidden narrative secrets’, and which act as an appropriately muted recognition and celebration of Brontë’s feminism. Hardy’s purpose, in the writing of Dorothea’s Daughter and other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts (2011), was to enable a creative rather than critical discourse as a basis of literary judgment and analysis. Hardy’s stories are well attuned to voice, lexicon, form, affect, and the sense of an ending in each work. They create space for, among other things, consideration of Jane Eyre’s Adèle Varens and Villette’s Paulina Bretton and were written not only as critique in the form of fiction but in the spirit of homage.