An Unfinished Story: White’s Fictions of the Self

This chapter examines how the consolidation of White’s identity narrative influenced her later novels. Seventeen years separate the publication of White’s first novel from the later three in the series, years in which White revised her imaginative reconstruction of the father-daughter relationship and the family constellation more generally to reflect her now unshakeable conviction that the daughter’s illness develops from her vexed relationship with her father. The later novels thus trace the emergence of ‘schizophrenia’ in White’s protagonist. At the same time, White’s fidelity to her own experiences of illness surfaces in her explorations of depression and mania, providing a hitherto overlooked account of the onset of manic-depressive illness. The fractures that characterise both composition and publication history constitute important sites that reveal the evolution of White’s identity narratives and the subsequent changes in her fictional representations of illness, Catholicism and the father-daughter relationship as well as family dynamics more generally.