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Catriona Mills "The Disappearing Author: Lady Caroline Lamb and the Embodiment of the Text" This paper will examine the problem of authorship in Lady Caroline Lamb's third and final novel, Ada Reis (1823). Ada Reis is constructed as an autobiography, written in the early 18th century by the pirate Ada Reis and his daughter, Fiormunda. Said to have been removed from Fiormunda's desert grave, it is edited and heavily annotated by an anonymous third-person narrator before being presented to the public. The awareness that Ada Reis is a fictional text, however, is maintained through the presence of a figure known only as The Author, who pens the novel's Dedication. Behind these separate authorial figures Ada Reis and Fiormunda, the narrator and the Author is the Ultimate Author, Lamb herself. In this paper, I will trace the various means by which authors assume control over the text and yet ultimately prove powerless, beginning with the fictional autobiographers and moving outwards to Lamb herself. As each author relinquishes their authority over the text, the latter becomes embodied, until it is eventually able to move through Society independently of its authors and experience a level of social influence that is unavailable to them. Biography: Catriona Mills completed a B.A. Hons at Maquarie University in Sydney, with a thesis on Frankenstein. This led her to the novels of Lady Caroline Lamb, which she has been assiduously pursuing as a Ph.D. project at the University of Queensland for the past two years. This has left her little time to develop any of the interesting hobbies that normally go in biographies. |
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