Literary life after death

Posthumous publications fall into three distinct varieties

In his study of late style, written shortly before his own death from leukaemia, Edward Said invoked a concept of lateness quite divorced from the traditional view. Rather than seeing it in the standard terms of maturity, a lifetime's accrual of experience and knowledge resulting in a rounded, all-encompassing vision, Said proposed to investigate those composers and writers whose late style was marked by "intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction", that rage against the dying of the light heard at its most paradigmatic in the mingled elegance and fury of the late quartets of Beethoven.

On this view, late works express the antagonism of age, a state in which we become less rather than more reconciled to the world, hurling imprecations at our carers, refusing the cliches of tranquil reflection. But what of those latest of late works, the ones that only appear after the final demise of their creators? What is their status?

There are three kinds of posthumous works: the accidental, the intentional and the illicit.

Often, the only thing to offer a hint of consolation at a great literary loss is the knowledge that there was another work, maybe more than one, in the pipeline. Even living to 96 may turn out not to have exhausted Patrick Leigh Fermor's publishing career. Beryl Bainbridge and David Foster Wallace are two of the departed whose final works, torturously enough in Wallace's case, have emerged since their deaths. To put it vulgarly, such works can feel like the bonus track on the CD. Where there was only one work in the first place – and it was Wuthering Heights – it can leave us with a tormenting sense of what might have been.

But there is something altogether more poignant about writing that we specifically weren't meant to see until after the author's departure. EM Forster's Maurice, written on the eve of the first world war, remained securely unpublished until the year after his death in 1970, because its exuberant picture of gay sexual awakening rendered it literary contraband until soon before. Forster left it to be judged by the world to come. Although he considered it among his best writing, he had no appetite for the prurient inquisition its publication during his lifetime would inevitably elicit.

Like Maurice, Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903) was only published the year after its author's death, in line with his wishes. The novel uses the grand format of the Victorian family saga to trace a caustic depiction of 19th-century moral corruption, in which the hypocrisies of the fathers are visited upon the great-grandson whose youthful Christian hope fizzles to nothing amid a morass of swindling, bigamy, alcoholism and sexual assault. The poignancy of its posthumous appearance lies at least partly in the fact that, by 1903, his scathing indignation was scarcely a lone voice.

In the last category are all the orphans of literary history, the works disowned by their authors at the last, as they bequeathed instructions to others to do what they could so often have done themselves, and destroy them. The paradigm case in recent debate has been Kafka, a cache of whose unpublished works is now sitting in a strongbox in Israel, still fiercely fought over nearly 90 years after his death because his executor Max Brod couldn't bear to burn them. We now have Nabokov's unfinished The Original of Laura, contrary to its creator's intentions. We also have the Aeneid, condemned as a failure only by its dying author.

The debate about whether we ought or ought not to have been allowed to read The Trial is in one sense wholly pointless, for reasons to do with horses and stable doors. Its appearance reminds us that authors are not the only arbiters of their work, and that the grave robs them, brutally enough, of any rights over its fate. Better that than dwelling on the image of Charlotte Brontë stuffing what remained of Emily's papers on to the Haworth Parsonage fire.