Literary Burden(s): Genre, Manuscript Culture and the Ethics of Non-Transmission in Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda

This article examines Hester Pulter’s prose romance The Unfortunate Florinda (MS Lt q 32, c. 1651–65) through the concept of Literary Burden, a category I propose here, standing for the intersection of generic pressure, the asymmetry between Pulter’s voracious reading and her exclusion from print, and the ethical impossibility of narrative closure after sexual violence. Reading Pulter’s lyrics, emblems and unfinished romance together, I argue that the work’s double non-ending–the truncated “happy” at the close of Part I, juxtaposed with “Finis,” and the “till” suspended at the close of Part II–constitutes a principled refusal. Continuation would require either falsifying trauma through the consolation the romance form promises or reinscribing violation through narrative compulsion. Where existing readings (Herman 2010; Jacobs 2014; Zhang 2018) have foregrounded the romance’s political register and Florinda’s active agency, I identify a parallel level at which the form of the manuscript registers what the plot’s politics cannot resolve. Situating Pulter’s romance within the female-authored romance tradition mapped by Hackett (2000) and in association with the notion of complaint as reframed by Ross and Smith (2020b), the article reads The Unfortunate Florinda as the prose-romance extension of a formal habit: a sustained pressure on inherited consolatory forms to the point at which they stop. Drawing on Assmann on storage memory, Ricoeur on the work of mourning, Rosenfeld on clausal endlessness, Ferguson on rape narrative and Dolan on female credibility, I propose that unfinishedness is simultaneously the only ethical response available to Pulter and the condition that secures her exclusion from the canon she had read but could not enter.