The first part of this book has focused on the various ways in which authors made their presence felt when working between and across the fictional forms of novel and theatre. The author-character has emerged as a distinctive presence. Speakers of prologues and epilogues are author surrogates as are, on occasion, those dramatis personae that resemble known characteristics of the author (Goldsmith), were performed by the author him or herself (Haywood), or put an actor on stage in the play as a version of the author (Fielding). In turn novels draw on conventions from the stage to announce the presence of a narrator (asides, shrugs, keeping character), and shape versions of the author's biography through analogy with the biographies of their characters. Consistently and anxiously, authors return to the struggle to represent their own presence in their works. This process itself reveals the extent to which authorial ‘identity’ is a function of the presence of audience, whether in the shape of those in the physical auditorium or in the novelistic sensorium of the reader's mind.

I have argued that it is the play of unconcealment and withdrawal that organises authorial presence. I have explored the different ways in which this process plays out in specific cases of four authors whose careers were distributed between writing novels and writing for the theatre. While we can identify moments of conscious fictionalising of themselves as authors, a concentration on works in both media that are produced together close in time (and often in relation to each other) allows us to see not so much the intention of the author as the combination of forces and elements that go to construct fictions of presence where a kind of authorial signature or mark is provided. While these are examples specific to authors and take individual shape and patterns, they are also the result of a shared experience and positioning. I have often termed this between novel and theatre and have taken particular interest in those hybrid works that appear to bridge both media: the play that has more success as a published ‘novelised’ fiction, the prose fiction populated with characters from a play or allusion to a stageplay world.