Introduction
"A laboriously constructed skeleton": retrospection, loss and obituary in Villette
"It sounds as hollow as a coffin": the empty tomb in Bleak house
Wilkie Collins, narrativity, and epitaph
Memorialization and endlessness in Dickens's Our mutual friend
Edwin Drood: the seminal missing body

This book asks why Brontë, Dickens, and Collins saw the narrative act as a series of textual murders and resurrections? Drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Blanchot, and de Man, Zigarovich maintains that narrating death was important to the understanding of absence, separation, and displacement in an industrial and destabilized culture.