Unfinished Business and Self-Memorialization: Rebecca West's Aborted Novel,Mild Silver, Furious Gold

Abstract

M, Lany writers' oeuvre contains aborted work ? abandoned, unfinished, or unpublished manu? scripts ? but such work may be unfinished for various reasons. Most obviously, writers sometimes perish before a lengthy manuscript is completed, as was notoriously the case with Dickens' The Mystery ofEdwin Drood (1870). Writers may also abandon works for less obvious reasons: loss of interest in the project, the burden of supporting oneself with another job, or even resistance to the idea of narrative closure. Rebecca West (1892-1983) was a woman of great perseverance and a prolific writer ? not only of fiction but also of journalistic essays, travel literature, political studies, and book reviews; she is not generally known for her inability to finish what she started. One example of her tenacity was her so-called Russian novel, titled Cockcrow in early drafts. West left off work on this novel in 1944, but finally finished and published it more than twenty years later as the best-selling The Birds Fall Down (1966). A significant amount of West's work was nevertheless unfinished and unpublished at the time of her death in 1983: an epic study of Mexico; five novels, including the final volume of her autobiographical family trilogy, Cousin Rosamund: A Saga ofthe Century, and her autobiographical memoir, Family Memories.1 With the exception of the Mexican study, these unfinished works are all autobiographical and derive from some of her more ambivalent personal relationships. The unfinished but posthumously published Sunflower (1986), for example, fictionalizes her highly emotional transition from a volatile tenyear relationship with H.G. Wells to a brief but failed romantic relationship with William Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook.2 West's perhaps most conflicted relationship, that with her son by