This journal's enterprise is temporally double, staging an encounter between the Victorian and neo-Victorian, between the two periods' aesthetic productions and material works, their discourses, ideologies, and socio-political contexts. It explores themes of modernity, alterity, and evolution through time and place in an ever more globalised and interconnected world. Two ages of literature and the arts reflect and converse with each other, the nineteenth century dreaming into the future, our own present moment reading and re-imagining the past, conjoined in an ever-changing interplay of light and shadows, visibility and obscurity, self and doubled other. Neo-Victorian Studies is hosted by Swansea University, Wales, UK
Notes on Contributors for NVS 15-2 (2024/2025), special issue on Neo-Victorian Contagion.
Copyright (c) 2025 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This review essay considers Elstob's Reimag(in)ing the Victorians in Contemporary Art: Britain and Beyond in the context of recent neo-Victorian visual artworks and exhibitions and the relative scarcity of critical work on this aspect of neo-Victorian culture.
Andrea Barrett’s neo-Victorian short story ‘Ship Fever’ (1996) portrays the catastrophic conditions on the Canadian quarantine island Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence River off the coast of Quebec in 1847 when hundreds of starving, typhus-infected Irish people, displaced by British colonial occupation and the Great Famine, arrived there in what came to be known as the coffin ships. By contracting the vast historical and geographical landscape of this episode of epidemic contagion to the small Canadian quarantine island and portraying it as the heterotopic mirror of Famine Ireland, the short story form enables a narrowing of focus on typhus as a little-understood infectious disease at a point of intensifying crisis. My close reading of the story traces the intertextual ‘web of affinities’ activated by the constellation of heterotopic sites, which also uncovers a link with George Eliot’s writing on contagion in Middlemarch (1871-1872).
Nationalistic Contagion in Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker’s Dracul:
Dacre Stoker and J. D. Barker’s prequel/biofiction Dracul (2018) not only rewrites Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) but also inverts the relationship between foreignness and contagion. By reimagining Bram Stoker’s early childhood sickness, and fictionalising a relationship with his nanny Ellen Crone, Dracul portrays contagion as an inherently localised, isolating issue, and suggests the possibility of treatment and the development of a cure as a direct result of globalism, personified in the character of Crone. Unlike other Stoker biofictions, including Dacre Stoker’s sequel Dracula: The Un-Dead (2009), which reinforce fear of reverse colonisation in Stoker’s source text, Dracul posits a direct correlation between global interconnectedness and remedy. This inverted relationship is particularly resonant in relation to the isolationist rhetoric that emerged during the 2020-2023 COVID-19 pandemic.
This article considers the heterotopic implications of what we might now term ‘local lockdown’ in Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (2000). Now newly relevant in the context of the social and cultural impact of the recent pandemic, Holman’s narrative, set in 1831 Sunderland, quarantined due to high incidence of cholera, provides a key point of comparison with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, exploring the violent potential of this isolated locality. By tracing key aspects of Michel Foucault’s definition of the ‘heterotopia’ (spatiality, temporality, and identity), I evaluate the ways in which Holman’s Sunderland speaks to twenty-first-century anxieties about the limitations and permissions of local lockdowns.
This article explores the depiction of contagious diseases in two neo-Victorian video games. In both Ready at Dawn’s The Order: 1886 (2015) and Arkane Studios’ Dishonored (2012), disease is used to comment on Victorian anxieties about class. The antagonist of Dishonored lets loose plague-carrying rats in the working-class districts of the capital as part of his “Poverty Eradication Plan”, which then affects the entire population. In The Order: 1886, the aristocratic player-character Grayson is tasked with ridding London of so-called Half-Breeds, creatures like werewolves or vampires, which seem to have taken over Whitechapel. At first glance, both games establish a rather clear-cut and decidedly classist distinction between ‘good/rich/healthy’ and ‘evil/poor/diseased’. Yet, in both cases, this illusion soon vanishes as the player uncovers a conspiracy of social control and engineering originating from the aristocracy. Both video games represent a metropolis in crisis and renegotiate Victorian anxieties about urban public space, and thus about poverty, contagion, and middle-class desire for spatial and ideological separation from the poor.
This article discusses the representation of contagious diseases in Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music (2014) and Michael Nava’s The City of Palaces (2014). It argues that, in the two texts, disease is used to illuminate instances of discrimination and exclusion in the nineteenth century, thus inviting a consideration of the issue of (non)belonging then and now, as well as within neo-Victorianism. In particular, the article aims to show that the two texts utilise disease to shed light over the abjection of particular ethnic groups in the nineteenth century, and that in doing so they allude to contemporary issues of exclusion. Furthermore, the two texts employ disease to suggest connections between these abjected Others and the female protagonists, emphasising that the latter too are vulnerable to arbitrary violence from various figures of authority as a result of their sociopolitical disempowerment. Finally, the article raises questions about the ethics of mediating the experiences of marginalised communities through the perspectives of those with greater societal privilege, and discusses the implications of this narrative strategy for neo-Victorian fiction and scholarship. Emma Donoghue, Frog Music, Michael Nava, neo-Victorian, precarity, vulnerability
The (Neo-)Victorian Sherlock Holmes Paradigm
Scientists, epidemiologists and medical researchers, who in their past studies on Coronavirus focused on the detection of its origin and on tracing back the trail of contagion, often compared their activity to Sherlock Holmes’s investigations. In particular, references to Sherlock Holmes occurred in some Chinese medical reports, which alluded to this well-known literary and cultural icon to suggest the international relevance of the battle against COVID-19. In this respect, Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’ (1913), a short story in which Holmes is (seemingly) infected by a deadly tropical disease, may be seen as an expression of what I call ‘the Sherlock Holmes Paradigm’. This paradigm identifies the investigator’s fight against disease and infection coming from outside the margins of the British empire; at the same time, the detective’s investigations lead to the awareness that these infections are not necessarily caused by an ‘external’ source but originate within the boundaries of the British Empire. ‘The Sherlock Holmes Paradigm’ has also been adopted and updated in a series of neo-Victorian texts that directly or indirectly borrow elements from Holmes’s adventures: from David Stuart Davies’s Sherlock Holmes: The Shadow of the Rat (2010) to Tom Holland’s Supping with Panthers (1996) and George Mann’s The Affinity Bridge (2008); in these novels, Sherlock Holmes and Holmesian investigators have to face diseases contaminating London, proving that the scientific methods used by Doyle’s detective are an extremely useful approach in both medical and literary discourse, in particular as regards the complex relationship between the ideas of ‘centre’ and ‘margins’.
This critical introduction explores the thematics of the 2024/2025 special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies on Neo-Victorian Contagion through the lenses of viropolitics, Sherlock Holmesian investigative tropes, disease metaphors, ethics of care contesting forms of Othering, and disciplinary regimes of power promoting political and capitalist interests. It outlines likely future trajectories of and developments in neo-Victorian contagion fiction, as well as introducing the special issue contributions.
Victorian fictional representations of infection tended to equate normalcy with a healthy state and compliance with the established order, categorising outcasts and non-compliant individuals as enemies of development and menaces to society. This article examines two televisual adaptations of Frankenstein’s creature, which interrogate the resulting conflations of non-normative characters with ‘carrier of contagion’ that precipitate cultural degeneration. In Penny Dreadful, during the outbreak of a near-apocalyptic infection, the reanimated John Clare disrupts his creator’s unethical scientific work of resuscitating corpses. In The Frankenstein Chronicles, the police officer John Marlott is infected with syphilis before becoming an ‘undead being’, while he investigates the moral corruption at the heart of an epidemic plaguing the poorest districts of London. Both ostracised ‘monsters’ decode the rotten mechanisms of society, exposing a body politic plagued by economic inequality and inhumanity through acts of (counter-cultural) viropolitical resistance. Subversively, the two neo-Victorian texts thus also metaphorically ‘contaminate’ the literary canon of horror fiction, refiguring ‘monsters’ as quasi-political activists.
Review of Dominique Gracia, The Meinir Davies Casebook (2023)
Copyright (c) 2024 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
George Eliot’s Private Lives and Public Persona
Eliot’s literary afterlife is not such a widespread phenomenon as Dickens’s afterlife. Fictions rewriting Eliot have exploited the author’s unconventional life and been studied as melodramas, while more recently, Rebecca Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch (2014) and Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl (2015) have proven more ambitious by welding biographical data with celebrity biofiction. This article adds Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s In Love with George Eliot (2019) to the two above-mentioned works to investigate their generic fluidity, from auto/biography to autobiografiction. Even if there is a core of ascertained facts concerning the historical figure that are found almost unchanged in the three texts, the shift from Eliot as Eminent Victorian to her postmodern textual inscription as neo-character reveals dissonant facets. The resulting composite kaleidoscope borrows from diverse epistemological fields: historiography, literary romanticism, visual and material culture, or even musicology. Authorship is explored from a whole spectrum, ranging from the financial management of an artist career to the cult of numinous inspiration. The common feature between these three different revisionist texts, however, lies in their attempt to democratise Eliot’s magisterial voice.
The Affective Affordances of Victorian Women
There has been a recent turn towards the personal voice and creative memoir in Victorian Studies; works like Nell Stevens’s The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time (2018) and Annette R. Federico’s edited volume My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice (2020) explore and dramatise personal engagements with Victorian literature. Such texts make explicit what often remains invisible in literary criticism: scholars’ personal, affective relationships with historical texts and the imagined lives of authors, and how such relationships shape their scholarly and pedagogical pursuits. In so doing, such texts challenge the established idea that rigorous scholarly work necessarily precludes the inclusion of personal experience. In this essay, I situate The Victorian and the Romantic within the genre of new experiential literary criticism to demonstrate how affective engagement with literary texts can expand – rather than contract – interpretive possibilities and give readers insight into women’s writerly lives.
Neo-Victorian Orientations towards the Fictional Writer
Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006) narrates the story of Bessy Buckley, an Irish girl who searches for work and finds it in Castle Haivers, employed by Arabella Reid. The novel unfolds an unexpected course of actions, which will shift Bessy’s position from being a vulnerable subject to a resilient one through storytelling. Bessy becomes a writer with a voice of her own, but also finds strength. This essay focuses on the character of Bessy, a maid who pens her story, thus becoming a writer, but who also achieves improvement through friendship, bonding, and care. Also, the maid’s disorienting voice complicates any reading of the novel as it paradoxically engages with the reader’s desire for the truth, as well as with the constructed nature of her piece of life-writing. Ultimately, in The Observations, the act of writing (and reading) is then coupled with ethics of care in a Victorian context through a contemporary lens.
Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince (2018) is a neo-Victorian biofictional film that depicts Oscar Wilde’s final years in exile within the narrative framework of his 1888 children’s story of the same name. In the film, Wilde (portrayed by Everett) recounts excerpts from the story both as a narrator and onscreen character, which facilitates narrative time jumps from his deathbed to earlier points in his life, and illuminates different aspects of the author by comparing him to various characters from the fairytale. With a desire to invite viewers to relate to Oscar the man, rather than Wilde the icon, Everett fashions a rendering of the author that is intensely personal and based upon his own connection with this famous figure. This filmic biofiction is thus a curious blend of fiction and reality, literary work and life experience.
An (Auto)Biofictional (Re )Writing of a Brontë Classic
Alison Case’s Nelly Dean (2016) is in many ways typical of the numerous re-writings of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). In this contemporary novel, constructed as a monologic epistolary retelling of its famous hypotext, Nelly is given the opportunity to tell Mr. Lockwood her side of the story, as well as to provide new information about her relationships to the other characters, especially Hindley Earnshaw. Moreover, the double interrogation of who exactly Nelly is writing for and why she is writing looms larger and larger as the story develops. This article focuses on the analysis of this self-reflexivity and on the promotion of Nelly Dean from second-hand narrator in Wuthering Heights to writer of her own biography in Case’s eponymous novel.
Queer Heritage and Strategic Humour in Recent Screen Biofictions of Emily Dickinson
The article discusses three latest screen portrayals of Emily Dickinson, namely Terence Davies’s biopic A Quiet Passion (2016), Madeleine Olnek’s independent biographical comedy Wild Nights with Emily (2018), and Alena Smith’s Apple TV+ teen series Dickinson (2019-2021), examining to what extent these texts can be termed neo-Victorian biofictions. The article focuses on the latter two screen products, which are analysed as queer and self-reflexive biofictions, questioning and subverting the dominant cultural image of the poet as a reclusive writer and thinker, and portraying her in an irreverent and often humorous way. Their respective creators both chose to make Dickinson’s love affair with her sister-in-law the driving force of the plot, demythologising the poet and claiming her as an icon of queer heritage. In turn, Terence Davies’s 2016 biopic is treated as a counterfoil to the other two, by virtue of its startlingly conservative and heteronormative agenda. Furthermore, the article discusses the use of humour as a strategy in queer biofiction, and finally it analyses how Olnek’s and Smith’s projects deploy romantic comedy tropes in their presentation of the romance between Emily Dickinson and Sue Gilbert.
Neo-Victorian Girl Sleuths for Today’s Middle-Grade Readers
Middle-grade readers, those aged eight to twelve, encounter lessons in feminism through a range of neo-Victorian mystery novels featuring girl sleuths. This essay shines light on two such series that offer exciting adventure narratives couched within biofiction. Jordan Stratford’s Wollstonecraft Detective Agency series (2015-2018) gleefully bends chronological dates to allow a young Mary Godwin (later Shelley) to befriend Ada Byron (later Lovelace); the series’ four novels infill the thought-lives of these young writers, depicting them as creators of knowledge even during the period of their juvenilia. Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes series (2006-present) uses life-writing to give voice to a Victorian girl’s perspectives on the burdens of living in a patriarchal culture. The girls’ cases develop a lineage of great Victorian women figures like Mary Somerville, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Florence Nightingale, women who are introduced within the context of their published work. The article further examines how women characters write in code as a way to communicate knowledge seen as deviant by patriarchal systems.
Re-Imagining the Brontë Sisters in Isabel Greenberg’s Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës (2020) and Bella Ellis’s Brontë Sisters Mystery Series (2019–)
Reconstructions of the Brontë sisters as exceptional women, worthy of empathy and admiration by twenty-first-century readers, increasingly rely on the entanglements of the sisters’ literary ambitions and limiting contemporary gender roles. By relying on visual and topical appeals in the form of graphic novels and detective stories, neo-Victorian adaptations of the Brontës further broaden the dimension of biofiction (and vice versa). As instances of popular literature, Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel Glass Town (2020) and Bella Ellis’s (aka Rowan Coleman’s) Brontë Sisters Mystery Series (2019–) present creative approaches to and engagements with the Brontës, indicating that for a contemporary readership, interest in the authors as protofeminist characters proves to be just as important as interest in their literary oeuvre.
Fan Fictions – Victorian Celebrity Novelists and Their Contemporary Defenders
If we love the work of a writer whose politics, personal behaviour and character can be shown to be alarming, disgusting or dangerous – if she, he (or they) is racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist, a child-molester or an advocate of selective murder – should we continue to admire their prose? This is the central question that has preoccupied my thinking about neo-Victorian biographical fictions. In this essay, I examine the tensions between three modes of writing: history, biography, and fiction and address the question of neo-Victorian critical ethics. I then proceed to discuss two biographical fictions of Victorian writers, written at the beginning of the twenty-first century in very different literary registers. The first text is Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), which dramatises the later writing years of Henry James. The second text is Kate Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me (2001), which reinterprets the relationship between Charles Dodgson, the Oxford don who became Lewis Carroll, and his child Muse, Alice Liddell. Neither of these novels were consciously written as neo-Victorian biographical fictions, yet both address the question of biographical ethics and judgements. Do we write to defend the writers we love against all comers, or to judge them in the light of contemporary morals and literary aesthetics? Or are we simply rewriting them in our own image?
Review of Sarah Leavitt, Agnes, Murderess
Notes on Contributors for NVS 15:1, special issue on Beyond Biofiction
Seeking Correspondence through Possessions
This article offers an examination of biographical and literary approaches to rereading and rewriting the Brontës, particularly the way in which the figures of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre rematerialise in contemporary fiction. It considers the way that this presence is figured through the material legacy of the Brontës, focusing on two recent works – Catherine Lowell’s The Madwoman Upstairs (2016) and Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015). In Lowell’s novel, Brontë relics represent an association with death and loss, the material object emptied out and carrying the aura of emptiness and grief. Conversely, in her biography, Lutz uses the same objects to summon a lived sense of the Brontës. The two texts, one non-fiction, the other a novel, are characterised by a fascination with the lives and works of the Brontës and an interplay between fanfiction and literary criticism relating to the context of their writing and biographies. Both books summon the ghosts of the Brontës through depiction of the sisters’ possessions and their writing, as well as acts of writing in Jane Eyre (1847), in order to explore the individual stories the objects tell as well as the ones they conceal.
Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale: Or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) is based on flashbacks concerning Edward Driffield, a recently deceased Victorian author, who is partly based on Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Alroy Kear, a fictional representation of Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) and author of a planned account of Driffield’s life, insists that everything should not be told in the biography, suggesting that some things may be better left unsaid. In a prefiguration of the self-reflexivity of postmodernism, the narrator, Ashenden – Maugham’s own persona – expands on the value of the first-person narrative, raising questions of reliability. Thus, the representation of the three author-characters becomes a means to deconstruct the myth surrounding the figure of the writer. Indeed, the reader is led to question what makes the reputation and worth of an author, as Maugham proposes a critical assessment of the process of idealisation of the Victorian author figure, from the relatively brief temporal distance of some forty years.
Zadie Smith and the Form of the Historical Novel
While Zadie Smith’s fiction has often related feelings of social density and change through lengthy chronologies exploring generational difference, The Fraud is her first “proper” historical novel. Set over several decades in the nineteenth century, the novel imagines the interconnection between two characters on the fringe of the historical record: Eliza Touchet, cousin by marriage, housekeeper, advisor, and former lover of the popular novelist William Ainsworth, and Andrew Bogle, an emancipated Jamaican who becomes a person of interest during the Tichborne affair, a sensational legal saga that occupied the public imagination for years. Smith’s status as one of the twenty-first century’s most prominent authors ensures that The Fraud will have a large audience. At the same time, however, many readers will likely complain about the difficulty the novel presents in its obscure references and challenging form. Unlike the authors of nineteenth-century historical romance, who frequently use their works to dramatize historical events and catalogue the habits, values, and languages of cultures on the verge of disappearance, Smith allows descriptions of her novel’s historical context to occupy a secondary position. Events are referred to, but rarely elaborated on. Instead, the novel’s chapters weave together brief, disjointed, and occasionally impressionistic episodes that only gradually cohere into something resembling a traditional plot. While these features demand a laser-like focus from the reader, Smith’s powers of characterisation and self-conscious centring of under-examined perspectives highlight The Fraud’s position as a significant accomplishment, both in terms of her own artistic development and the development of the historical novel as a genre.
Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media
Guest Editors' introduction to the 15:1 Special Issue: Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media (2023/2024)
Neo-Victorian Studies 14:1 (2021/2022)
Copyright (c) 2023 Neo-Victorian Studies https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
There Ain’t No Black in (Neo-)Victorianism? Oh Yes, There Is!:
Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Marlena Tronicke and Julian Wacker (eds.), Black Neo-Victoriana. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2022. ISBN: 978-90-04-46914-3 £ 93.00
Chase Berggrun’s R E D and Transfeminist Erasure:
This article examines how the lyric speaker of Chase Berggrun’s poetry collection R E D (2018) composes herself from the multiple narrative voices of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Berggrun uses erasure as both an embodied and a textual practice in order to record the testimony of a survivor of gender-based violence. An experiment in generic and temporal transformation, R E D is best analysed through the lens of trans studies as its author extends queer and feminist readings of Dracula.