Viking £15.99 pp390

One of the best stories in Stuart Kelly’s excellent account of all the great books that have been lost to posterity concerns the 4th-century BC Greek dramatist Menander. He was revered by Julius Caesar and Quintilian among others as second only to Homer — a sort of early realist, witty, humane and profound. He was the source of the only non-scriptural quotation in St Paul’s writing, and, although all his work had been lost, he enjoyed a holy place in the critical pantheon for more than two millennia.

Then, in 1905, fragments of five of Menander’s plays, including Dyskolos, turned up in Egypt; 50 years later the rest of Dyskolos surfaced in Geneva. The masterpiece was lovingly pieced together, translated and, finally, produced and broadcast by the BBC in 1959. It was awful.

The translator admitted that it was “not a work of calibre”, while Erich Segal, the classics professor, thought Menander a “suburban Euripides”. The plots of the other restored plays revealed a kind of proto-Whitehall farce, with rape, incest and unexplained orphans — Ray Cooney with a whiff of Tarantino.

The moral is that not all we have lost was necessarily great. Kelly’s definition of “lost” reasonably includes “not written” or “abandoned” as well as missing. When Jane Austen dedicated Emma to the Prince Regent, his librarian took the opportunity to suggest a few further plot lines to Miss Austen, including an epic romance on the history of the house of Saxe-Coburg. She elegantly declined; and had she had not done so, there would have been no Persuasion.

What are the greatest lacunae in our literary heritage? Presumably the plays of Sophocles, only seven from 120 of which survive. The prize jury of Athens never gave him less than second prize, so, if the juries were reliable, this suggests that Sophocles wrote 113 other plays as good as Oedipus Rex. A further heartbreaking absentee is Homer’s third epic, a comedy by all accounts, called Margites, only a few lines of which survive in quotation in other writers. This is perhaps the most tantalising loss in literature, though Kelly argues, I think, that had it survived it might have been irksome for future comic writers to work in Homer’s giant shadow.

Kelly is a bibliomane, whose passion for lists, dates and details fits him well for this task. Occasionally, one feels his desire to be all-inclusive might have been curbed; it is hard to see by what definition of “lost” it is legitimate to speculate that Swinburne would have written more and better if he had been less silly. It is also odd that someone so at home with the Greeks and Romans as Kelly appears to be should make common mistakes of meaning when using words that derive from their languages, such as “internecine”, “cohort” and, most bizarrely, “alibi”.

These are small quibbles about what is on any view a formidable piece of bibliographical belletrism, which will serve better as reference or bedside book than as straight narrative. Kelly deals wittily with the question of Love’s Labour’s Won, which title, he argues, represents a genuinely missing Shakespeare play rather than an alias (alibi!) for an extant one. Each of his 90-odd chapters gives, as well as the story of a book we don’t possess, a sort of shilling-life of its author which, to those of us (those few, I often think) who do not care for the 900-page Life, is a free bonus. I liked the story of one of Milton’s early editors, who was so sure that the old blind guy had got the last couplet of Paradise Lost wrong that he changed two of the greatest lines in English — “They hand in hand, with wand’ring steps and slow, Through Eden made their solitary way” — to: “Then hand in hand, with social steps their way Through Eden took with heav’nly comfort cheer’d.” Editors, eh?

Even when the territory is familiar, Kelly has something to add. We are whisked through the usual whodunit conundrum of Dickens’s unfinished Edwin Drood, but Kelly is good on the actual quality of the novel: “shows a novelist eager to expand the range of his work . . . a series of resonances and ambiguities that seem comparable to the films of David Lynch”; while with the most famous tale of all — when John Stuart Mill inadvertently allowed a friend’s maid to burn the only manuscript of Thomas Carlyle’s The History of the French Revolution — he gives us the key detail: that it was Carlyle who had to console Mill: “Mill, whom I had to comfort and speak peace to, remained injudiciously enough till almost midnight, and my poor Dame and I had to sit talking of indifferent matters; and could not till then get our lament freely uttered.” That “injudiciously enough” puts us right there, at that fraught fireside.

In the case of Herman Melville, Kelly has unearthed a gem: a novel called Agatha that remained unwritten by two great novelists — Melville himself, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who passed the project back and forth, each encouraging the other. Melville was in possession when the music stopped, but although among his papers at his death they found Billy Budd, of Agatha there was no trace.

Kelly is as poised among the moderns as the ancients, and his account of Sylvia Plath’s non-existent second novel, Double Exposure or Double Take, is fascinating and psychologically acute. The consolation for the absence of this semi-autobiographical text, however, is considerable: it would doubtless have spawned a dozen more parasitic volumes in the Hughes-Plath “industry”, and those are some books for whose “loss” we can all be profoundly grateful.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £14.39 on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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