Unfinished: Notes on Angela Carter & Not Writing

After Angela Carter died at 51, her executor discovered the synopsis for a Jane Eyre sequel folded away in a drawer. I have remained fascinated with this unwritten book since I first heard of it, owing to a longstanding personal obsession with unfinished projects: sprawling works that exist only in fragment, as typed notes or handwritten pages or an idea tucked into a corner of someone’s mind. For some time now I have wanted to write about the book that Carter never had the chance to begin.

I’ve written this essay over and over. The previous paragraph carries through each draft, introducing you to my obsession, providing context—and from there it inevitably devolves.  

* 

Instead of writing, I look out the window. Each sentence takes minutes. I write a word and then stare off into space. Another word, another minute.

A hardcover copy of Carter’s biography sits on my desk, guilting me. She looms on the cover, reproduced beautifully in black and white; she watches me write and send emails and work on everything but this essay with her two unblinking eyes.

I’d meant to read The Invention of Angela Carter from start to finish, as biographer Edmund Gordon likely intended. Instead I dip in and out, consuming random sections of her life before putting the book back down again. I don’t want to read about her lung cancer or her death. Biographies of the dead always fill me with a sense of foreboding, as I am unable to shake the gloom of what I am reading toward. My achronological reading habit acts as a kind of protection, allowing me to read in a state where Carter is perpetually alive—sometimes younger, sometimes older, but never gone.

Of the sequel Gordon writes that Carter was “planning to recover” after finishing a course of radiotherapy; it was during this time that the novel was pitched. We are given the bare bones of a story that Carter imagined would run 50,000 words. The novel would have followed Rochester’s ward, Adela, on a dark and twisted path of romance that smacks of the Electra complex.

It strikes me, returning again to the index, that the full discussion of this unwritten novel is located on page 404 in the hardcover: classic internet shorthand for “Page Not Found.”

*

 I reread Carter’s Wikipedia page. At the time of this writing, the entry says the following of the Jane Eyre sequel: only a synopsis survives. As if the book itself had been a living entity.

In the internet age, nothing is more discouraging than the realization that you have found every piece of information that exists about something online. I’m no stranger to this problem; I have scraped the final pages of many a Google search, been failed by the Wayback Machine time and again. I have read the executor’s Guardian article, the biographer’s commentary, every one-line synopsis and speculative blog post.

The book itself does not exist. I allowed myself to prolong this realization for some time, living in a kind of alternate universe where the book simply had yet to be found, existing as a handwritten manuscript in a forgotten dusty box in someone’s attic. That would make for a better story, wouldn’t it?  

*

I Google images of Carter, scrolling the consequent gallery. I have long since memorized her particular smile, the black-and-white lines of her cheekbones, the variant pairs of oversized glasses. I feel as if I could draw her from memory.

Did she identify more with Jane or with Bertha, I wonder? Jane Eyre is a book that people often develop deep, personal attachments to. It feels like a personality quiz just waiting for you to begin: Are you Jane? Or are you the madwoman in the attic? 

I studied Jane Eyre during my undergraduate degree. I spent hours driving between cities back then; the people I loved were spreading themselves further apart from each other, and I accumulated countless hours in transit before my graduation. I listened to a Jane Eyre audiobook on one of these trips; the resulting experience would print itself indelibly within my mind as one of motion.

*

Instead of writing this essay, I make a list of reasons why I shouldn’t.

I haven’t finished the biography. I should reread Jane Eyre first. I don’t know everything there is to know about Angela Carter. I have not personally seen the proposal for the unwritten Jane Eyre sequel. And I am not a nonfiction writer!

I say this last one adamantly to myself, attaching an exclamation point. Upon initially writing this I am apparently very sure of it. Upon returning to it I question the exclamation point and the confidence it implies.

As if the nonfiction narrative is not just another way of telling a story. As if we do not all, every day, share the narratives of our lives with each other. Perhaps the mere act of transcribing an obsession is a kind of nonfiction. Maybe what I have to do to finish the essay is make you understand why I am obsessed with this book that was never written. But I am still not entirely sure of the answer myself.

Can you finish a project without yet knowing what it is about? Or is it the act of completion that finally communicates this to the writer? Does the understanding in some cases come after the completion, even the publication?

 Am I writing this for you, or for myself?

*

There is a story I have been working on since grad school. I add whole sections. I take them out. I write elaborate backstories that are never included in any form. Whole scenes that no one else will ever read. I submit the story in different forms and it receives varying degrees of rejection.

It’s finished! I have thought at least a hundred times. The exclamation point again. And then I open the document once more: an hour later, a week later. Months. But I always return.

Maybe we can think of unwritten stories not as incomplete works, but their own kind of form, of genre. Narratives that have yet to be transcribed. The yet feeling more hopeful than never. The idea that Carter’s story still exists somewhere out in the ether, merely waiting to be written down.

Or maybe when we are obsessed with something, the project can never be finished. A publication only ever a stop along the way rather than an endpoint. A writer once told me at a reading that she wanted to take her book off the shelf and keep going, keep adding, keep making changes. There was still so much she had to say.

I myself have difficulty looking back at my earlier published work, returning to the old obsessions with new eyes. Perhaps we are all leaving a trail of ourselves, our evolutions not just as writers but as people, and this is part of the point—not saying what we want to say with perfect clarity, but depicting a process of creative evolution. Like shedding husks digitally, a trail across the internet marking iterations of our earlier selves.

*

In a perfect world I could end this essay with the discovery of a completed manuscript, a sheaf of pages in the attic. But many artists die before their time. Many projects are never finished. We mourn not just this one unwritten book, but the ideas that Carter could have had over the next fifty years if she had lived—the things she hadn’t even begun to think of yet.

I went through a phase where I was adamant about the existence of the multiverse. I still like to think that somewhere out there exists a universe where Carter is still alive. Where she finished her sequel to Jane Eyre. Where Charlotte Bronte herself didn’t die at 38. Where I wrote the version of this essay I envisioned when I put pen to paper for the first time, the idea the newest and freshest that it would ever be. A universe where no one dies until they have said every last thing they want to say.