Scott's Endings: The Fictions of Authority

Abstract

S COTT FOUND HIS CONSCIOUS INTELLIGENCE an unreliable guide to the end of a narrative. Now have not the slightest idea how the story is to be wound up to a catastrophe, he journalized of Woodstock (12 February 1826). I am just in the same case as used to be when lost myself in former days in some country to which was a stranger-a willful plight familiar to his heroes. I only tried to make that which was actually writing diverting and interesting, leaving the rest to fate. And two years later (24 February 1828) in retrospect: I have generally written to the middle of one of these novels, without having the least idea how it was to [end]. Alexander Welsh quotes these excerpts in a chapter called Authority, and this is where they belong.1 For Scott's uncertain sense of ending is a reflection of the crisis of authority through which he lived, and his narrative closures express the complexity of his response to that crisis.