Double Lives:

Neo-Victorian Girlhood in the Fiction of Libba Bray and Nancy Springer

Abstract

This essay explores how the trope of the double life in Libba Bray’s and Nancy Springer’s neo-Victorian fiction for girls illustrates adolescent literature’s struggle with what Kate Mitchell identifies as a key issue in neo-Victorian fiction: “how to package the Victorian past for the tastes and demands of contemporary readers” (Mitchell 2010: 3). Bray and Springer portray Victorian girls who lead duplicitous lives. Bray’s protagonist Gemma Doyle appears to be an ordinary schoolgirl but is actually a powerful young woman with access to a fantastical world; Springer’s Enola Holmes, the metafictional teenaged sister of Sherlock Holmes, disguises herself to solve mysteries while maintaining the appearance of propriety. Through tracing these protagonists’ performance of Victorian girlhood as a double life, I examine how Bray’s and Springer’s novels participate in postmodern discourses on girlhood that frame the girl as a psychologically complex individual whose socially produced subjectivity can be both transcended and fragmented.