Testamentary acts

The testamentary acts of Michael Millgate's title are those strategies of self-protection and self-projection by which authors attempt in old age to enhance posterity's view of themselves and their work. The four figures examined in detail here--Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy--sought to maintain posthumous control over their personal privacy and the integrity of their finally approved texts by, for example, destroying documents, writing autobiographies, revising their earlier works and supplying them with retrospective prefaces, and publishing so-called…