Cultural and Emotional Debates About the Value of Private Property and the Right

Gaylin and Rose, in particular, offer carefully nuanced and rather inventive readings

of their chosen texts (for Gaylin, the multivalent motif of possession in gothic fiction, and for Rose the accretion of meanings which cluster around the term inheritance in Daniel Deronda 'memory, nation, race, culture, commitment, community'. Subsequent essays address class competition figured as the battle between legitimate and illegitimate heirs (Carol Margaret Davison on Jekyll and Hyde), bereavement as a means of assessing self-reflexively an author's own Links Of London Bracelets novelistic inheritances (Jay Dickson on E. M Forster), disinheritance as an active choice rather than a passive process and the impact of gender and sexuality on modernist plots of inheritance.

On the whole, the essays are fresh and vigorously expressed: knowledgeable readers familiar with complex Victorian plots of entailment and transmission, like Middlemarch and Felix Holt, or even simply suggestive and intriguing stories about wills, like Oliver Twist and Bleak House, will find much here to enhance their understanding of the ways in which inheritance functions in a metaphorical as well as a legal sense. But this attention to metaphorical rich nesses to the many ways in which the language of legal entitlement serves to describe our cultural and emotional inheritances is also the weakness of the volume. A number of the essays, whilst persuasive in themselves, stray too far from the primary sense of inheritance as a legal form: Maurer's informative piece on the vicarious enjoyment of property in Trollope's fiction, for example, makes a number of valuable points about the ways in which a wife's relationship to her husband's property serves as an insightful illustration of 'the readers' assumed desire for a vicarious experience of Parliament', yet it seems to illuminate for us broader ideas of property and public identity, rather than the particulars of private transmission and inheritance. Despite the claims of the introductory essay, legal inheritance is not fore grounded as the primary focus of the volume: instead, metaphorical applications of the term seem to multiply as one proceeds through the essays, and thus the material treated in the collection can at times seem rather diffuse and the essayists' interests almost too wide-ranging.

Consequently, it becomes easier to note omissions: given the disruptive (and fruitful) impact of Darwinian evolutionary thought on Victorian and modernist fiction, for example, heredity and biological inheritance (and its role in the formation of personal identity) is treated less Links Of London Charms comprehensively in the volume than might be expected: Clissold and Rose deal with this material explicitly, but others mention it only in passing. Yet this is not to undermine the value of the collection as a whole: it does not necessarily deliver on its promise to uncover and articulate the entanglement of narrative and law, but it offers a rich and imaginative assessment of the ways in which legal form and narrative fiction are themselves embedded in broader cultural and emotional debates about the value of private property and the right to transmit it to one's chosen heirs.

Cultural and Emotional Debates About the Value of Private Property and the Right

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