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  • The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life by Stefanie Markovits
  • Patrick Fessenbecker (bio)
The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life, by Stefanie Markovits; pp. vi + 302. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £55.00, $74.00.

It is a special kind of pleasure to read a narrowly focused study like Stefanie Markovits's new book The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life. It does not aspire to political insight or transformative historical study, but limits itself to the careful analysis of a peculiar genre: the "verse-novel." Not quite epic, and certainly neither lyric nor prose novel, the verse-novel in Markovits's hands emerges as a distinctly Victorian generic formation, albeit one with Romantic ancestors and modernist descendants. Markovits argues, moreover, that its intermingling of formal features was central to its appeal. The combination of lyricism and narrative, for example, allowed Coventry Patmore in The Angel in the House (1854) to negotiate the hard problem of representing marital love: because it takes place over time, marital love refuses the kind of intensive distillation so prominent in the lyric. What is necessary instead is a form that can grasp the slow changes in love over the long stretch of a marriage. And other features of the genre evoke and correspond to other themes, including adultery, European travel, and transatlantic trade.

Perhaps the most distinctive close readings in the book come in Markovits's repeated uncovering of the way a feature of the form turns up as an element of overt content in the text, and the way elements of the content seem to exist simultaneously as embodiments of the form. So, for instance, in her account of "Adulterated Verse," Markovits turns to a scene in Violet Fane's Denzil Place (1875) where the heroine meets a soon-to-be lover by accident in the library at midnight. But why did she go to the library in the first place? Because she had finished the second volume of the novel she was reading and wanted to get the third. The drive to adultery turns out to be strongly related to the "desire for narrative," and the formal combination of narrative and lyric in the genre [End Page 504] and the thematic consideration of infidelity turn out to be interrelated (50). The most theoretically ambitious chapter, Markovits's analysis of "form-things" in Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, considers a similar tension (125). On the one hand, the jewels these poets describe are literal objects relevant for narrative plots, but on the other, they also contain a "narrative potential" in themselves (131). There are thus several references to literal pearls in The Ring and The Book (1868–69), but at the same time Pompilia is herself compared to a pearl, and the lie at the center of her story—Violante's feigned pregnancy to cover up her adoption of Pompilia—is itself compared to the initial piece of grit that begins the process of pearl formation. Recalling that process reminds one that making a pearl is in some ways an extended process of torture, and in Markovits's account The Ring and The Book is saturated with torture, encasing Pompilia's monologue at the center of the poem. So the pearl is more than a pearl: it is an evocation of the pattern that structures the work as a whole.

If I could press a bit on Markovits's distinction between form and content, however, it seems to me a key question gets answered in contradictory ways. One can best put it like this: does Markovits think writers who wanted to consider these topics (adultery, European travel, and so forth) found this form fitting and decided to use it, or that those writers who decided to use this form found themselves pushed toward these topics? Perhaps surprisingly, Markovits's account approaches but does not quite assert the latter: the frequency with which adultery recurs in verse-novels "is so pronounced as to make one wonder," she writes, "whether the form here 'leads to' adulterous content" (36). Generic form is thus not a tool an author might use, but a "conceptual interface" between author and institution (37). Really, though...

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