As its dynamic title suggests, Open the Door! is a novel about movement and space, concerned with exploring and crossing the boundaries of identity, gender and aesthetics. This traversing and transgressing of space is manifested in various ways: first in the novel's preoccupation with different locations - Glasgow, Italy, London - and their symbolic significance; secondly in the challenges it poses to women's existing roles and spheres; and, perhaps most importantly, in its attempt to understand and redefine the formation of a gendered identity, ‘opening the door’ to a new perspective on the self.

Carswell's project, then, is clearly an ambitious one. In this chapter I want to examine the strategies used to achieve such a ‘breaking through’, and in so doing to give a sense both of the novel's achievements and of its inherent tensions. Open the Door!, although ostensibly using the format of romance, is a dense and complex text, wide-ranging in the issues it considers and fascinating in the interconnections established between them. My focus in this chapter, therefore, will be on formal elements of the novel, including its heavy use of symbolism and literary allusion, its shifts between nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century experimentalism, and its reworking of a romance motif, all considered in relation to the novel's wider thematic concerns with the emergence of a gendered self.

Catherine Carswell was bom in 1879, brought up in Glasgow by prosperous and religious middle-class parents she later described as a ‘simple and philistine family’. From an early age Carswell perceived herself - and her family because of their evangelical fervour - as alien to their environment. Like the heroines of both Open the Door! and The Camomile, her early life reads as a search for escape from the moral and cultural confines of Glasgow. She attended English Literature classes at Glasgow University (at a time when women couldn't sit for a degree), visited Italy, and studied music at the Frankfurt Conservatory. Her first marriage, to Herbert Jackson in 1904, ended in disaster when he attempted to kill her and was declared insane. She then had to fight a long legal battle to have her marriage annulled. Her second marriage, to the journalist and writer Donald Carswell, was a successful partnership both professionally and personally. She also enjoyed friendships with D. H. Lawrence, Hugh MacDiarmid, Rebecca West, and Edwin and Willa Muir.

Lemuel W. Bangs was ‘thoroughly American by birth and taste. At Scribner’s he was known as “Bangsy”; the British called him “The Senator” and loved him.’ This description from Roger Burlingame, insider historian of Scribner’s publishing house and son of Edward L. Burlingame, is one of the few mentions in book history of the colourful figure of Scribner's London representative. It highlights the mediating role played by Lemuel Bangs: situated within two different cultures, he translated business practices and negotiated the competing interests of publishers, agents and authors on both sides on the Atlantic. Although he has received little scholarly attention, his many letters, held in the Scribner's Archive at Princeton, provide insights into the day-to-day business operations of an established firm of magazine and book publishers. The negotiations, resolutions of copyright conflicts, talentspotting, gatekeeping and book promoting practices of Lemuel Bangs reveal the nature of an increasingly demanding transatlantic market. Less personally invested in Stevenson than others in this study, Bangs nevertheless played his part in the battles of representation and possession carried out over the author. In securing publication of Stevenson's work for his firm, Bangs had to navigate the complicated network of Stevensonian surrogates and advocates in London and New York. These dealings demonstrate the broader prosthetic functions demanded by the changing world of 1890s publishing in a transatlantic context. Amidst fluctuations created by copyright law, new relations between publishers, writers and their representatives and a market imperative to identify new readerships, Bangs served as a linchpin. Presenting a version of British culture to his employers while acting as the voice of Scribner's in London, his role demanded flexibility and the capacity to speak on behalf of different interests. He had to appear responsive to literary diversity but also project an impression of cultural unity. The success of Lemuel Bangs in playing these complicated parts appears due to a distinctive combination of flamboyant personal charisma and the solid loyalty with which he served his employers over many years.

‘Even in their own house histories,’ notes Christopher Wilson, ‘the actual inner workings of quality magazine offices remain obscure. As in book publishing and newspapermaking, what memoirs exist are clouded by the various motives of eulogy and self-promotion.’ The position of Bangs, a conduit between different countries, agents and interests in the publishing process, has kept his story equally obscure.

Robert Louis Stevenson produced powerful personal, literary and professional attachments among those who knew him. ‘Stevenson’, wrote American publisher, Samuel S. McClure, ‘was the sort of man who commanded every kind of affection; admiration for his gifts, delight in his personal charm, and respect for his uncompromising principles’. His stepdaughter, Isobel Field, recalled in later life, ‘A stranger had only to associate with Louis for a few weeks and ever after he would unconsciously imitate his odd twists of the English language and many of his mannerisms.’ Andrew Lang famously noted that Stevenson ‘possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of making other men fall in love with him’. This meant, Lang continued, that people ‘warmed their hands at that centre of light and heat’. Stevenson was desired, imitated and adopted on more than a personal level. His style inspired other writers; he was imagined as the desired reader by aspiring novelists; and, although challenging conventional constructions of creativity in his writing habits, he epitomized the romantic author in the public imagination. In his career, the work, person and idea of ‘RLS’ were subject to complicated transatlantic transactions as business representatives, mentors, publishers, imitators and admirers all took on parts of that frail yet international Stevensonian body. After his early death, these networks reshaped themselves in response to economic exigencies, shifting reading publics and challenges to authorial reputation. The afterlife of Stevenson's writing and literary identity was again shaped by geographical, technological and aesthetic contexts in transition.

The unusual degree to which Stevenson was ‘incorporated’ – taken on as a business by those around him, situated within national cultures and literary genres, represented by competing interests in different parts of his authorial identity, and invested with personal emotion – makes him a particularly illuminating instance of the volatile literary field of the 1890s. Publishers were seeking new markets across the Atlantic, facing the challenges of copyright legislation and learning to work with authorial representatives or agents. The complexities of Robert Louis Stevenson's geographical, financial and literary situation demonstrate, in sharp detail, the ways in which the permeable bodies of ‘author’, ‘critic’, ‘editor’, ‘publisher’, ‘agent’, ‘reader’ and ‘celebrity’ were being fixed and re-fixed. The lens of literary modernism has focused on these increasingly complex bifurcations of cultural commodities.

Stevenson was less interested in maintaining the boundaries of the authorial body than many of his contemporaries: prosthetic performance in writing, in which more than one person took on the body of the author or performed a part of the creative process, did not seem to perturb him. He was unusually willing to collaborate, less exercised than other writers when it came to notions of literary possession, and frank and self-reflective about the material ‘stolen’ from his own reading. Most memorably, in ‘My First Book Treasure Island’ he acknowledged how ‘plagiarism’ happens, describing the moment he recognized his sources for the novel:

His frank, rueful yet celebratory tone challenges Romantic models of creativity in which ‘visions of literary making are intimately linked with the concept of a singular creator: the creative urge is dramatized as pulsing deep within the fastness of the individual self, and the solitary writer is seen to conjure ideas into the influence– proofed chamber of his or her imagination.’ Stevenson noted that while writing Treasure Island, ‘It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye.’

At the time of his death in 1894 Stevenson was working on two very different novels, moving between them as his enthusiasm determined and health permitted. Friends in London saw St Ives, the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England, as a return to earlier adventure-fiction successes, promising muchneeded commercial rewards. Stevenson jested, ‘It would make money for a harmless fambly.’ He was also writing Weir of Hermiston, which he referred to as The Justice Clerk, set in the same period but tragic and intense. Working on St Ives was increasingly an unhappy experience; he had a more positive attitude to Weir. Weir remains critically recognized as significant; St Ives almost disappeared from sight. Connections between the two novels, however, are closer than Stevenson acknowledged and go beyond their shared timeframe. Both are in dialogue with Scotland's history and identity: one through a tragic romance echoing the border ballads, the other through picaresque adventure. While deploying the voices and landscapes of Stevenson's youth, Weir has been seen as a move to greater maturity in his writing. In St Ives Stevenson also revisits places tramped across in his younger days – those Scottish border scenes given literary endorsement by Scott and Hogg – but views them through the eyes of a French stranger. Weir extends a shift towards psychological intensity begun in his South Seas fiction. His increasingly ironic attitude to adventure emerges in St Ives through inflation of the genre's conventions.

In both novels Stevenson, who had been writing energetically and controversially about the South Seas, returned to a Scottish setting, writing with a distance that recontours it. During a period in which the shaping of cultural modernity emerged, with time and distance increasingly compressed, Stevenson was a writer who travelled extensively by train, boat and donkey. As Charlotte Mathieson suggests, modes of movement, experience of journeys and different types of travel generate meanings – social, cultural and geographic. Weir of Hermiston is a novel locked into a place and a specific time, yet its dialogue with the patterning of such landscapes – expressed through interest in the telling of tales and inscribing of history – gives it a temporal distance which suggests mobile authorial revisiting. St Ives oscillates in distance from its historical setting and adventure genre by its parodic knowingness. It also moves through time and space in more obvious ways: journeying across a nation, journeying through nationalities.

When the Edinburgh Edition of Stevenson's Collected Works was published, Charles Baxter was clearly inscribed in the text, his initials watermarked under a circle containing those of RLS, as a device to protect copyright. This chapter likewise writes Charles Baxter into the textual travels and transactions of Stevenson's writing. As Chapters 1 and 2 suggest, Baxter figured large in the ‘Stevenson business’ and was a particular source of irritation for Lemuel Bangs. For Stevenson, Baxter was also a powerful imaginative presence as well as lifelong friend and advisor. Recalling an evening – and morning – spent in a London tavern with Baxter, Richard Le Gallienne wrote:

In explicitly devolving business and literary roles to Charles Baxter and Sidney Colvin, Stevenson drew two very different characters into the orbit of his affairs. The ‘dry’ Sidney Colvin was allocated the literary side of publication; the ‘business’ sphere was conducted by someone who had all the characteristics of a Stevensonian adventurer – a friend ‘of the heart’ according to Fanny, rather than a ‘friend of the intellect’ like Colvin. His passionate loyalty to the best interests of Stevenson – alive or dead – created conflict. His ‘personality’, which included a drinking problem, led to difficult transactions around Stevenson's work. Yet it was this personality that made him Stevenson's friend, the recipient of a private joke correspondence played out over many years, and a powerful figure in Stevenson's imagination when he wrote fiction. Although the editor of letters between the two men, Marshall Waingrow, situates Baxter as ‘the straight man to Stevenson's imaginative soarings’; he acknowledges that his was a performance as ‘dead-pan collaborator’ to which he brought ‘genuine brilliance’. Le Gallienne's recollections suggest more of a shared ebullience and swashbuckling love of words. Baxter functioned as authorial representative in the matter of business, assuming the identity of embryonic literary agent.

In the essay that led to his exchange with Richard Le Gallienne, Stevenson describes the pleasure of creativity for the writer who ‘sees his airy structure growing on the page’. Yet the immediate satisfaction of ‘a morning of successful work’ is mitigated because for those who make their way by professing to please, a day will come when it is hard to continue to delight: ‘the ardour shall have declined and the cunning shall be lost’ and the writer will be condemned to take on work he does not love. Even worse, ‘he must lie exposed to the gibes of the wreckers of the press, who earn a little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which they have not read, and the praise of excellence which they cannot understand’. Stevenson thus delineated the pleasures and pressures of the literary marketplace. The fate he outlined with some bitterness was not to be his yet, as the disarray of Le Gallienne's last years demonstrates, tastes change.

After Stevenson's death, after battles over his literary life, and in spite of, or perhaps because of, the proliferation of memorials (written and material) to him, his critical standing suffered. In a perceptive dissection of ‘the dialectics of a reputation’, J. C. Furnas offers various reasons why (in the words of Edwin Muir) ‘Stevenson has simply fallen out of the procession’. Personality and the romance of Samoan life, he suggests, diverted attention from his work to the man. At the same time as the image of ‘RLS’ was thus consolidated, he argues, his body of work became fractured: individual essays were set for school study, fragments of his writing appeared in anthologies. Treasure Island encouraged his framing as a popular author and writer for children and then its origins were obscured by cinematic adaptation. In his analysis Furnas gestures towards some of the tensions articulated in this study. ‘RLS’ offered a powerful image of authorship: his perceived boyishness, unstable health, geographical distance, movement across continents and abandoning of literary responsibilities, all reinforced constructions of him as romantic figure, set apart from the everyday business of literary production. Those same factors, however, led to very different kinds of investments in him, producing diverse incorporations of the authorial body into various interests and demanding that a range of players took on parts of the authorial body in acts of literary prosthesis.

In a memorial tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, published in the Speaker, and reprinted in Adventures in Criticism in 1896, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch lamented that British writers no longer had someone to write for: ‘We always wrote our best for Stevenson.’ It is curious, he added, that ‘for five years the needle of literary endeavour in Great Britain has quivered towards a little island in the South Pacific, as to its magnetic pole’. Novelist, critic and educator, Quiller-Couch (or ‘Q’ as he was known from his publishing pseudonym) was one of those drawn to Stevenson and in a ‘magnetic’ relationship with him. Reading, as described by Wayne Koestenbaum, is ‘an engagement achieved through the imagination, across a distance; a tightly knit affair between a speaker and a listener; a survivor's gesture of reconnaissance and affection towards the past’. Cornishman Quiller-Couch had been an avid reader of Stevenson; he emulated him in his own fiction; he was identified by publishers as a source of similarly best-selling adventure fiction; he was second choice to conclude Stevenson's last novel. Completing the last six chapters of St Ives, he wrote as a reader in an act of prosthetic authorship at its most obvious. In later life Stevenson remained significant for Quiller-Couch; he incorporated the language of adventuring and Stevenson's interest in style into his own contributions to literary criticism and the formation of English Literature as a discipline.

Quiller-Couch's imaginative needle quivered towards the South Pacific, but in his own literary career he was drawn, like Stevenson, to the literary markets of the United States. Both sought to make their names in international, particularly transatlantic, contexts. Both writers had close relationships with Scribner’s, publishing books with them and writing for their Magazine. Both writers worked at real geographic distances from metropolitan and publishing centres, even if Quiller-Couch's residence in Cornwall offered a rather less extreme version of peripheral existence than Stevenson in Samoa. Like Stevenson, Quiller-Couch preoccupied himself with a particular geography: for him Cornwall offered a literary landscape, just as the most popular of Stevenson's fiction used Scotland as its imaginary. Their fiction shares an interest in the historical as well as the spatial. But the differences between them – in their literary networks, their relationship to institutional establishments and their engagement with literary trends – are significant.

The final tale of transatlantic transactions and incorporation of Stevenson is that of Richard Le Gallienne (1866– 1947). Critic, novelist, poet, decadent and aesthete of the fin-de-siècle, in some respects Le Gallienne appears even more distant from Stevenson than Quiller-Couch. Yet he too connects with the Stevensonian body, invoking the writer in spiritual communion, engaging in dialogue with his critical perspectives and referencing Stevenson's work in his own writing as part of the ongoing search for success in both Britain and the United States. The most obvious and romantic link between the two men is the place ‘RLS’ held in the imagination of the younger writer. This role as inspirational author was made more vivid by a real critical debate, important for both, underpinned by a shared interest in the mechanics and economics of writing. During Le Gallienne's complicated life he ventured into a range of genres and marketplaces: Stevenson again served him in surprising ways on this journey, incorporated into his own poetry and fiction. Le Gallienne’s long and itinerant literary life, which took him from Liverpool to the highculture circles of 1890s aestheticism in London, then across the Atlantic and back, represents a model of mobility – geographical and generic – akin to Stevenson's but revealingly different. His story, stretching from 1890s decadence into the twentieth century, caught in the new literary configurations that century brought, presents a sharp delineation of the cultural kinesis that surrounded Stevenson. In his critical writing Stevenson engaged with tensions between professionalism and creativity, popularity and art. In his fiction he contributed to new understandings of mobility and geography. But in person, in his last years, he resolutely turned away from the business of publishing which brought his work to international readers. Le Gallienne, himself part of the publishing milieu and with a rather more practical understanding of its mechanics, criss-crossing the Atlantic in search of artistic and financial success and dependent upon the vagaries of transatlantic taste, was forced into a rather harsher confrontation of changing worlds in publishing.

Velvet-coated poets were particularly appealing to Oscar Wilde acolyte Le Gaillenne, whose life as son of a brewery manager from Birkenhead had been transformed by hearing Wilde lecture in 1883. In his association with Wilde, John Lane and the Rhymers Club, and as a contributor to The Yellow Book, Le Gallienne moved in different circles to Stevenson's friends.

In 1891 Edward L. Burlingame, editor of Scribner's Magazine, described to his employer a first meeting with Sidney Colvin in London, confessing he rather liked him, ‘though I was prepared to detest him because Stevenson had always insisted that he and I had points of resemblance.’ Burlingame’s ambivalence about this comparison may have been justified but the parallels between the men are illuminating. Stevenson called Colvin ‘A difficult, shut up, noble fellow’ yet acknowledged the kind nature lying behind that facade. On hearing of Burlingame's death in 1923, J. M. Barrie also wrote to Charles Scribner, puzzling affectionately over the emotions the Editor had induced:

Such images of a walled self, of emotions that initially appear frozen, of careful, gentlemanly and ‘honourable’ guardianship, run through this chapter's discussion of Sidney Colvin, friend, mentor, editor and wouldbe biographer of Stevenson. Nicknames given to Colvin by Stevenson and Fanny – ‘the Monument’ and ‘the Custodian’ – were based on his post as curator at the British Museum. They invoke the role he played during their lives and after but suggest his wider significance in a literary culture preoccupied with memorializing, with reputation and, in Michael Anesko's phrase, with ‘documentary monumentalism’. In a study of ways in which ‘critical cohorts have attempted to shape – ideally to control – the contours of [Henry] James's posthumous reputation’, Anesko draws on the concepts of ‘Ventriloquism’, ‘Revival’, ‘Legend’ to map literary curating. In his taxonomy, two categories for thinking about James, are particularly applicable to this chapter: ‘Custodial Conflicts’ and ‘Textual Monumentalism’ have considerable purchase in understanding the dynamics between Colvin and Stevenson, both during and after the latter's life.

In a review of Kate Atkinson's 2015 novel A God in Ruins, Lesley McDowell asks whether her ‘warm and approachable characters [and] her smart … funny … compassionate prose count against her when it comes to intellectual literary awards like the Booker? Even the new literary prize, the Folio, ignored the more experimental Life After Life.’ While literary innovation need not be assessed by prize-winning recognition, accessibility is a key aspect of Kate Atkinson's fiction. Working in genres that might be defined as popular (or at least familiar to a wide readership) – detective fiction, family saga, English country house fiction, historical fiction – she writes novels that deeply engage the reader in emotions, plots and characters, so as to make for a pleasurable, joyful, moving, affirmative and affective reading experi-ence. From her early fiction onwards Atkinson has demonstrated a ‘postmodern’ interest in the ontological, in ‘world-making and modes of being’. In her first novels that was expressed in explicitly experimental strategies. In her later writing she inhabits narrative convention more comfortably while simultaneously interrogating it in more fundamental ways. In its underlying challenges to normative understanding of being in the world, her fiction has grown in daring and profundity.

Through charting shifts in her deployment of different fictional forms, this chapter suggests that Atkinson's emphasis on plotting, which emerges in the combination of familiar and defamiliarising constructions of ‘events’ and ‘characters’, is part of a strategic attempt to produce novels that can be pleasurable and meaningful yet disruptive in their challenges to our thinking about time, history, justice and love. Atkinson's trajectory of experimentation and her unique pattern of generic shifts, from the ‘Case Histories’ series to the recent Life After Life (2013) and A God in Ruins, reveal that although her novels have been described as combining an interest in ‘history, family and identity within a postmodern aesthetic’, the increasing sophistication of that dynamic has made them both more complex and more commercially successful.

Kate Atkinson's first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), was an immediate success, an acclaimed first novel easily situated within a 1990s interest in both metafiction and the historical. It also offered an analysis of the determinants – family, location, culture and imagination – of the individual life that is touching, comic and more traditionally associated with the concerns of realist fiction.