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  • Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us by Louisa Hadley, and: History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages by Kate Mitchell
  • Beth Palmer (bio)
Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us, by Louisa Hadley; pp. vi + 192. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £52.50, $84.00.
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages, by Kate Mitchell; pp. ix + 222. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, £55.00, $84.00.

Neo-Victorian fiction looks back to the nineteenth century for stylistic inspiration, plot lines, characters, and settings, and engages with the cultural, moral, and social issues of the period. At the same time, the neo-Victorian novel is firmly rooted in the contemporary moment, keyed into the tastes of literary prize judges and Sunday evening television viewers. Critics of neo-Victorian fiction face the question of how to tackle this Janus-faced genre. Do they use Victorian fiction as a yardstick against which to measure its modern counterpart? Do they concentrate on situating the genre in its twentieth- or twenty-first-century postmodern moment? Which cultural debates do they engage with: the Victorians’ or ours? By concentrating on the relationships between the Victorians and ourselves, and on history and memory as processes in which neo-Victorian texts engage, Louisa Hadley’s and Kate Mitchell’s monographs complicate the separation of us and them. Both authors contribute significantly to the body of criticism in this area. The fact that two monographs on neo-Victorian fiction have been published by the same press in the same year provides further evidence, if any were needed, that neo-Victorian fiction is a growth area for academic interest.

Hadley states that her understanding of the genre “mirrors the dual approach of neo-Victorian fiction” which looks to both the past and the present (15). Each chapter of her work examines the pertinent Victorian contexts adroitly although the most probing cultural analysis is reserved for the late twentieth century. Hadley’s sound knowledge of the literary culture of the 1980s and 1990s—she has previously co-edited Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher and her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture (2010)—is apparent throughout. Margaret Thatcher stood down as prime minister in the same year that the publication of A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) “catapulted neo-Victorian fiction into the mainstream” (2), and a discussion of Thatcher’s invocation of “Victorian values” introduces the monograph by unpacking some of the cultural anxieties surrounding contemporary appropriations of the Victorian (qtd. in Hadley 3). The texts examined in the book, though, such as Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) and Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George (2005), range well beyond the end of Thatcher’s reign. Hadley might have stretched her contextual analysis further into the years of New Labour to explore why the neo-Victorian genre maintained its popularity despite changes in Britain’s political direction. [End Page 168]

Chapters are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which brings neo-Victorian texts together in new ways. The first chapter, “Narrating the Victorians,” looks at texts written in biographical modes: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), James Wilson’s The Dark Clue (2001), and Janice Galloway’s Clara (2002). Carey’s reworking of Great Expectations (1861) and Wilson’s sequel to The Woman in White (1860) make for a particularly interesting pair and contrast with Galloway’s imagined biography of the pianist and composer Clara Schumann. Victorian attitudes to biography are examined; Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë and J. A. Froude’s work on Thomas Carlyle are touchstones here. At the same time Hadley establishes a relationship between the bildungsroman and the biographical impulse by arguing for character as a central Victorian concern, one that Hadley feels is lost in contemporary fiction. These texts, she argues, emphasise accessibility of character but also probe the ethics of appropriating lives for the purposes of fiction in ways that the Victorian originals might not. Similarly thought-provoking comparisons are brought about in the further chapters on “Detecting,” “Resurrecting,” and “Reading” the Victorians. Colin Dexter’s historical Inspector Morse novel The Wench is Dead (1989) and Michèle...

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