Some of these are well-known and have been critically acclaimed (such as Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Gaskell's Wives and Daughters) but others possibly less so (for instance, Trolloppe's The Landleaguers or Collins' Blind Love).
What then of these novels that were never completed and therefore never reached the point of closure? These are the texts under study in nineteenth-century specialist Saverio Tomaiuolo's Victorian Unfinished Novels. Victorian novels moreover favoured a tidy closure (Weiss). For Peter Brooks, “only the end can finally determine meaning, close the sentence as a signifying totality”. 1“The moment of closure is the point at which the events of a story become fully intelligible to the reader”, Catherine Belsey explains about classic realist narratives.