The Margin that Remains

The coming of age of a young protagonist is a well-known theme in British fiction. The Margin that Remains investigates an equally persistent concern in the novel: the coming of age to characters who are no longer young. Janice Sokoloff examines changing visions of aging from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, bringing a new perspective to such famous characters as Defoe's Moll Flanders, Charlotte Brontë's Rochester, Henry James' Lambert Strether, and Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, as they face the loss of youth. The Margin that Remains reveals the crucial role of gender in fiction's varied representations of an aging process few of us acknowledge, in novels and in life.