In a post on Mental Floss, Lorna Wallace takes a look at eleven famous books that are thought to be lost forever. “There are many books that remain lost to this day, much to the sadness of readers everywhere,” she says. “Here are 11 of the most tragic literary losses.”
- The First Draft of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Either Stevenson or his wife condemned the hastily-written first draft to the fireplace.
- Meanderings of Memory by Nightlark. The purported original source of the word “revirginize”, the quest for this lost volume began when the chief bibliographer for the Oxford English Dictionary sought a copy to verify a citation. While researchers have identified references to the book, no copies have been found.
- Double Exposure by Sylvia Plath. The final fate of Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel is unknown, but most believe either husband Ted Hughes or Plath’s mother obtained the manuscript after her death.
- Yongle Encyclopedia. Before Wikipedia, this was the largest known encyclopedia, at 11,095 volumes. Compiled in China during the Ming Dynasty, only about 400 volumes are known to exist.
- Terry Pratchett’s Unfinished Works. Pratchett asked that all of his unfinished works be destroyed upon his death. At least 10 novels in progress were destroyed when a steam roller crushed his last hard drive.
- The History of Cardenio by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Researchers believe at least 744 plays from the Renaissance have been lost, including this one by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. The play was performed in 1613 but has never been found, along with the bard’s Love’s Labour Won.
- The Isle of Dogs by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson. This play was purposely suppressed by a flunky of Queen Elizabeth I, whose complaints about lewdness and sedition led to Jonson’s arrest. No one knows the contents, but academics speculate the queen may have been the target of satire.
- The Majority of Ernest Hemingway’s Earliest Stories. Multiple stories and a novel based on Hemingway’s WWI experiences were lost when his suitcase was stolen from his wife on a train from France to Switzerland.
- Lord Byron’s Memoirs. Bryon left this manuscript with fellow poet Thomas Moore to be published after his death, but a group of Byron’s friends decided that the memoir was so scandalous that it would destroy his reputation. This one also landed in the fire.
- The Margites by Homer. Only a few lines of this mock-epic poem have survived. Aristotle said the poem did for comedy what The Iliad and Odyssey did for tragedy. Other lost works of ancient Greek and Rome include Euripides’s tragedy Andromeda; the majority of writing by Julius Caesar; and Sappho’s nine volumes of lyric poetry, of which only “Ode to Aphrodite” is complete.
- The Poor Man and the Lady by Thomas Hardy. After it was rejected by multiple publishers, Hardy destroyed this manuscript himself. Some traces have been found, but the original is lost.
Are any of your characters in search of one or more of these books? What might have happened to some of them? How might our stories have changed if any had survived? To what lengths would someone go to obtain one? Whether central to your story or merely a MacGuffin, what happens next?
